EX-LIBRIS 


LOUISE  ARNER  BOYD 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CALIFORNIA 


GIFT  OF 


Louise  A.   Boyd 


JOHN    H.    WALLACE. 


THE 


HORSE  OF   AMERICA 


IN  HIS 


DERIVATION,  HISTORY,  AND  DEVELOPMENT. 


TRACING  HIS  ANCESTORS,  BY  THE  AID  OF  .MUCH  NEWLY  DISCOVERED  DATA, 

THROUGH  ALL  THE  AGES  FROM  THE  FIRST  DAWNINGS 

OF  HISTORY  TO  THE  PRESENT  DAY. 

INCLUDING  THE  HORSES  OF  THE  COLONIAL  PERIOD,  HITHERTO  UNEXPLORED, 

GIVING  THEIR  HISTORY,  SIZE,  GAITS  AND  CHARACTERISTICS 

IN  EACH  OF  THE  AMERICAN  COLONIES. 

SHOWING  HOW  THE  TROTTING  HORSE  IS  BRED,  TOGETHER  WITH  A  HISTORY 

OF  THE  PUBLICATIONS  THROUGH  WHICH  THE  BREED 

OF  TROTTERS  WAS  ESTABLISHED. 


WITH  MAPS  AND  ILLUSTRATIONS. 


BY 

JOHN    H.    WALLACE, 

tl 

Founder  of  "  Wallace's  American  Trotting  Register,"  "  Wallace's  Monthly," 
"Wallace's  Tear  Book,"  etc. 


NEW  YORK: 
PUBLISHED  BY  THE  AUTHOR. 

1897. 


Entered  according  to  act  of  Congress,  by 

JOHN  H.  WALLACE, 
in  the  year  1897,  at  Washington,  D.  C. 


GIFT 


PREFACE. 


THE  study  of  the  Horse,  from  the  first  glimmerings  of  history, 
sacred  and  profane,  and  tracing  him  from  his  original  home  through 
his  migrations  until  all  the  peoples  of  the  globe  had  received  their 
initial  supply,  may  not  be  a  new  idea,  but  it  is  certainly  a  new 
undertaking.  Horse  Books  without  number  have  been  written, 
mostly  in  the  century  just  closing,  but  in  the  history  of  the  horse 
they  are  all  alike — merely  reproductions  of  what  had  been  printed 
before.  So  far  as  my  knowledge  goes,  therefore,  this  volume  is  the 
first  attempt,  in  any  language,  to  determine  the  original  habitat  of 
the  horse  and  to  trace  him,  historically,  in  his  distribution. 

The  facts  presented  touching  the  introduction  of  the  horse  into 
Egypt,  and  two  thousand  years  later  into  Arabia,  as  well  as  the 
plebeian  blood  from  which  the  English  race  horse  has  derived  his 
great  speed,  will  be  a  shock  to  the  nerves  of  the  romanticists  of  the 
•old  world  as  well  as  the  new.  Taking  the  facts  of  history  and 
well-known  experiences  together,  my  readers  can  determine  for 
themselves  whether  the  claims  for  the  superiority  of  Arabian  blood 
is  not  pure  fiction.  For  my  own  part  I  cannot  recognize  any  blood 
in  all  horsedom  as  "royal  blood "  except  that  which  is  found  in 
the  veins  of  the  horse  that  "  has  gone  out  and  done  it,"  either 
himself  or  in  his  progeny. 

In  our  own  country  there  has  always  remained  a  blank  in  horse 
history  that  nobody  has  attempted  to  supply.  This  blank  embraced 
a  century  of  racing  of  which  we  of  the  present  generation  have 
been  entirely  ignorant.  Believing  that  a  correct  knowledge  of  the 
horse  of  the  Colonial  period,  in  his  size,  gait,  qualities  and  capaci- 
ties was  absolutely  essential  to  an  intelligent  comprehension  of  the 

251 


iv  PREFACE. 

phenomena  presented  on  our  trotting  and  running  courses  of  the 
present  day,  I  have  not  hesitated  to  bestow  on  this  new  feature  of 
the  work  great  labor  and  research.  In  this  I  have  felt  a  special 
satisfaction  in  the  fact  that  while  the  field  is  old  in  dates,  this  is 
the  first  time  it  has  ever  been  traversed  and  considered. 

In  the  chapters  which  follow,  many  historical  questions  are 
treated  at  such  length  as  their  relative  importance  seems  to  demand, 
embracing  the  different  families  that  have  contributed  to  the  build- 
ing up  of  the  breed  of  trotters;  and  the  question  of  how  the  trot- 
ting horse  is  bred  is  carefully  considered  in  the  light  of  all  past 
experiences  and  brought  down  to  the  close  of  1896.  These  chap- 
ters will  not  surprise  the  old  readers  of  the  Wallace's  Monthly,  for 
they  will  here  meet  with  many  thoughts  that  will  not  be  new  to 
them,  but  they  will  find  them  more  fully  elaborated,  in  more 
orderly  form,  and  brought  down  to  the  latest  experiences. 

It  is  not  the  purpose  of  this  book  to  furnish  statistical  tables 
covering  the  great  mass  of  trotting  experiences,  nor  to  consider  the 
mysteries  of  the  trainer's  art  that  have  been  so  ably  discussed  by  ex- 
perienced and  skillful  men.  But  the  real  and  only  purpose  is  to 
place  upon  record  the  results  of  years  devoted  to  historical  research, 
at  home  and  abroad;  to  dispel  the  illusions  and  humbugs  that  have 
clustered  about  the  horse  for  many  centuries;  and  to  consider  with 
some  minuteness,  which  of  necessity  cannot  be  impersonal,  the 
great  industrial  revolution  that  has  been  wrought  in  horse-breed- 
ing, and  all  growing  out  of  a  little  unpretentious  treatise  written 
twenty-five  years  ago,  which  contained  nothing  more  striking  than 
a  little  bit  of  science  and  a  little  bit  of  sense  intelligently  com- 
mingled. The  battle  between  the  principles  of  this  treatise  and 
selfish  prejudices  and  mental  sterility,  was  long  and  bitter,  but  the 
truth  prevailed,  and  in  the  production  of  the  Driving  Horse  the 
teachings  of  that  little  paper  have  placed  our  country  first  among 
all  the  nations  of  the  earth. 

JOHN  H.  WALLACE. 

NEW  YORK:  40  WEST  93o  STREET. 
September  1,  1897 


CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER  I. 

INTRODUCTION. 

PAGES 

General  View  of  the  Field  Traversed 1-23 

CHAPTER  II. 

ORIGINAL    HABITAT  OF  THE  HORSE. 

No  indications  that  the  horse  was  originally  wild — The  steppes  of  High  Asia 
and  Arabia  not  tenable  as  his  original  home — Color  not  sufficient  evi- 
dence— Impossibility  of  horses  existing  in  Arabia  in  a  wild  state — No 
horses  in  Arabia  until  356  A.D. — Large  forces  of  Armenian,  Median 
and  Cappadocian  cavalry  employed  more  than  one  thousand  seven 
hundred  years  B.C. — A  breed  of  white  race  horses — Special  adaptability 
of  the  Armenian  country  to  the  horse — Armenia  a  horse-exporting 
country  before  the  Prophet  Ezekiel — Devotion  of  the  Armenian  people 
to  agricultural  and  pastoral  pursuits  through  a  period  of  four  thousand 
years — All  the  evidences  point  to  ancient  Armenia  as  the  center  from 
which  the  horse  was  distributed 24-35 

CHAPTER  III. 

EARLY  DISTRIBUTION   OF   HORSES. 

First  evidences  of  horses  in  Egypt  about  1700  B.C. — Supported  by  Egyp- 
tian records  and  history — The  Patriarch  Job  had  no  horses — Solo- 
mon's great  cavalry  force  organized — Arabia  as  described  by  Strabo  at 
the  beginning  of  our  era — No  horses  then  in  Arabia — Constantius  sends 
two  hundred  Cappadocian  horses  into  Arabia  A.D.  356 — Arabia  the  last 
country  to  be  supplied  with  horses — The  ancient  Phrenician  merchants 
and  their  colonies — Hannibal's  cavalry  forces  in  the  Punic  Wars — 
Distant  ramifications  of  Phoenician  trade  and  colonization — Commerce 
reached  as  far  as  Britain  and  the  Baltic — Probable  source  of  Britain's 
earliest  horses 36-50 

CHAPTER  IV. 

THE   ARABIAN   HORSE. 

The  Arabian,  the  horse  of  romance — The  horse  naturally  foreign  to  Arabia 
— Superiority  of  the  camel  for  all  Arabian  needs — Scarcity  of  horses  in 
Arabia  in  Mohammed's  time — Various  preposterous  traditions  of  Arab 
horsemanship — The  Prophet's  mythical  mares — Mohammed  not  in  any 
sense  a  horseman — Early  English  Arabians— the  Markham  Arabian 
— The  alleged  Royal  Mares— The  Darley  Arabian — The  Godolphin 
Arabian — The  Prince  of  Wales'  Arabian  race  horses — Mr.  Blunt's  pil- 
grimage to  the  Euphrates — His  purchases  of  so-called  Arabians — Deyr 


Vi  CONTENTS. 

as  a  great  horse  market  where  everything  is  thoroughbred — Failure  of 
Mr.  Blunt's  experiments — Various  Arabian  horses  brought  to  America 

Horses  sent  to  our  Presidents — Disastrous  experiments  of  A.  Keene 

Richards — Tendency  of  Arab  romancing  from  Ben  Hur 51-66 

CHAPTER  V. 

THE  ENGLISH  RACE   HORSE. 

The  real  origin  of  the  English  race  horse  in  confusion — Full  list  of  the 
"  foundation  stock"  as  given  by  Mr.  Weatherby  one  hundred  years  ago 
— The  list  complete  and  embraces  all  of  any  note — Admiral  Rous'  ex- 
travaganza— Godolphin  Arabian's  origin  wholly  unknown — His  history 
— Successful  search  for  his  true  portrait — Stubbs'  picture  a  caricature 
— The  true  portrait  alone  supplies  all  that  is  known  of  his  origin  and 
blood 67-78 

CHAPTER  VI. 

THE  ENGLISH   RACE   HORSE   (Continued). 

England  supplied  with  horses  before  the  Christian  era — Bred  for  different 
purposes — Markharn  on  ..be  speed  of  early  native  horses — Duke  of  New- 
castle on  Arabians — His  choice  of  blood  to  propagate — Size  of  early 
English  horses — Difficulties  about  pedigrees  in  the  seventeenth  and 
eighteenth  centuries — Early  accumulations  very  trashy — The  Gallo- 
ways and  Irish  Hobbies — Discrepancies  in  size — The  old  saddle  stock 
— The  pacers  wiped  out — Partial  revision  of  the  English  Stud  Book.. 79-89 

CHAPTER  VII. 

THE  AMERICAN   RACE   HORSE. 

Antiquity  of  American  racing — First  race  course  at  Hempstead  Plain,  1665 
— Racing  in  Virginia,  1677 — Conditions  of  early  races — Early  so-called 
Arabian  importations — The  marvelous  tradition  of  Lindsay's  ' '  Arabian" 
— English  race  horses  first  imported  about  1750 — The  old  colonial  stock 
as  a  basis — First  American  turf  literature — Skinner's  American  Turf 
Register  and  Sporting  Magazine,  1829 — Cadwallader  R.  Colden's 
Sporting  Magazine,  short-lived  but  valuable — The  original  Spirit  of 
the  Times—  Porter's  Spirit  of  the  Times —  Wilkes'  Spirit  of  the  Times, 
1859— Edgar's  Stud  Book — Wallace's  Stud  Book — Bruce's  Stud  Book 
— Their  history,  methods  and  value — Summing  up  results,  showing 
that  success  has  followed  breeding  to  individuals  and  families  that 
could  run  and  not  to  individualsand  families  that  could  not  run,  what- 
ever their  blood 90-107' 

CHAPTER  VIII. 

COLONIAL   HORSE   HISTORY — VIRGINIA. 

Hardships  of  the  colonists— First  importations  of  horses — Racing  prevalent 
in  the  seventeenth  century — Exportations  and  then  importations  pro- 
hibited— Organized  horse  racing  commenced  1677  and  became  very 
general — In  1704  there  were  many  uild  horses  in  Virginia  and  they 
were  hunted  as  game — The  Chincoteague  ponies  accounted  for — Jones 
on  life  iu  Virginia,  1720 — Fast  early  pacers,  Galloways  and  Irish 
Hobbies — English  race  horses  imported — Moreton's  Traveler  probably 
the  first — Quarter  racing  prevailed  on  the  Carolina  border — Average 


CONTENTS.  V 

PAGES 

size  and  habits  of  action  clearly  established — The  native  pacer  thrown 
in  the  shade  by  the  imported  runner — An  Englishman's  prej- 
udices  108-119 

CHAPTER  IX. 

COLONIAL  HORSE  HISTORY — NEW  YORK. 

Settlement  of  New  Amsterdam — Horses  from  Curagoa — Prices  of  Dutch 
and  English  horses — Van  der  Donck's  description  and  size  of  horses — 
Horses  to  be  branded — Stallions  under  fourteen  hands  not  to  run  at 
large — Esopus  horse — Surrender  to  the  English,  1664 — First  organ- 
ized racing — Dutch  horses  capable  of  improvement  in  speed — First 
advertised  Subscription  Plate — First  restriction,  contestants  must  "  be 
bred  in  America" — Great  racing  and  heavy  betting — First  importations 
of  English  running  horses — Half-breds  to  the  front — True  foun- 
dation of  American  pedigrees — Half-bushel  of  dollars  on  .a  side — 
Resolutions  of  the  Continental  Congress  against  racing — Withdrawal 
of  Mr.  James  De  Lancey — Pacing  and  trotting  contests  everywhere — 
Rip  Van  Dam's  horse  and  his  cost 120-127 

CHAPTER  X. 

COLONIAL  HORSE   HISTORY — NEW   ENGLAND. 

First  importations  to  Boston  and  to  Salem — Importations  from  Holland 
brought  high  prices — They  were  not  pacers  and  not  over  fourteen 
hands — In  1640  horses  were  exported  to  the  West  Indies — First  Ameri- 
can newspaper  and  first  horse  advertisement — Average  sizes — The 
different  gaits — CONNECTICUT,  first  plantation,  1636— Post  horses 
provided  for  by  law — All  horses  branded — Sizes  and  Gaits — An  Eng- 
lishman's experience  with  pacers — Lindsay's  Arabian — RHODE  ISLAND, 
Founded  by  Roger  Williams,  1636 — No  direct  importations  ever  made 
— Horses  largely  exported  to  other  colonies  1690 — Possibly  some  to 
Canada — Pacing  races  a  common  amusement — Prohibited,  1749 — Size 
of  the  Narragansetts  compared  with  the  Virginians 128-134 

CHAPTER  XL 

COLONIAL  HORSE  HISTORY — PENNSYLVANIA,  NEW  JERSEY,  MARYLAND,  CARO- 
LINA. 

Penn's  arrival  in  1682 — Horse  racing  prohibited — Franklin's  newspaper — 
Conestoga  horses — Sizes  and  gaits — Swedish  origin — Acrelius'  state- 
ment— NEW  JERSEY — Branding — Increase  of  size — Racing,  Pacing 
and  Trotting  restricted — MARYLAND — Racing  and  Pacing  restricted 
1747 — Stallions  of  under  size  to  be  shot — NORTH  CAROLINA — First 
settler  refugees — SOUTH  CAROLINA — Size  and  gait  in  1744 — Chal- 
lenges— No  running  blood  in  the  colony,  1744— General  view 135-141 

CHAPTER  XII. 

EARLY   HORSE   HISTORY — CANADA. 

Settlement  and  capture  of  Port  Royal — Early  plantations — First  French 
horses  brought  over  1665 — Possibly  illicit  trading — Sire  of  "  Old 
Tippoo" — His  history — "  Scape  Goat"  and  his  descendants — Horses  of 
the  Maritime  Provinces ,  142-153 


viii  CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER  XIII. 

ANTIQUITY  AND  HISTORY  OP  THE  PACING  IIOKSE. 

PAGES 

The  mechanism  of  the  different  gaits — The  Elgin  Marbles — Britain  be- 
comes a  Roman  province — Pacers  in  the  time  of  the  Romans — Bronze 
horses  of  Venice — Fitz  Stephen,  the  Monk  of  Canterbury — Evidence 
of  the  Great  Seals — What  Blundeville  says — What  Gervaise  Markham 
says — What  the  Duke  of  Newcastle  says — The  amble  and  the  pace 
one  and  the  same — At  the  close  of  Elizabeth's  reign — The  Galloways 
and  Hobbies — Extinction  of  the  pacer — The  original  pacer  probably 
from  the  North — Polydore  Virgil's  evidence — Samuel  Purchas'  evi- 
dence— The  process  of  wiping  out  the  pacer — King  James  set  the 
fashion — All  foreign  horses  called  "  Arabians" — The  foreigners  larger 
and  handsomer — Good  roads  and  wheeled  vehicles  dispensed  with  the 
pacer — Result  of  prompting  Mr.  Euren — Mr.  Youatt's  blunder — Other 
English  gentlemen  not  convinced  there  ever  were  any  pacers 154-171 

CHAPTER  XIV. 

THE  AMERICAN  PACER  AND   HIS  RELATIONS  TO  THE   AMERICAN  TROTTER. 

Regulations  against  stallions  at  large — American  pacers  taken  to  the  West 
Indies — Narragansett  pacers;  many  foolish  and  groundless  theories 
about  their  origin — Dr.  McSparran  on  the  speed  of  the  pacer — Mr. 
Updike's  testimony — Mr.  Hazard  and  Mr.  Enoch  Lewis — Exchanging 
meetings  with  Virginia — Watson's  Annals — Matlack  and  Acrelius — 
Rip  Van  Dam's  horse — Cooper's  evidence — Cause  of  disappearance — 
Banished  to  the  frontier — First  intimation  that  the  pace  and  the  trot 
were  essentially  one  gait-  -How  it  was  received — Analysis  of  the  two 
gaits — Pelham.  Highland  Maid,  Jay-Eye-See,  Blue  Bull — The  pacer 
forces  himself  into  publicity — Higher  rate  of  speed — Pacing  races  very 
early — Quietly  and  easily  developed — Comes  to  his  speed  quickly — His 
present  eminence  not  permanent — The  gamblers  carried  him  there — 
Will  he  return  to  his  former  obscurity  ? 172-189 

CHAPTER  XV. 

THE  AMERICAN    SADDLE   HORSE. 

The  saddle  gaits  come  only  from  the  pacer — Saddle  gaits  cultivated  three 
hundred  years  ago — Markham  on  the  saddle  gaits — The  military  seat 
the  best — The  unity  of  the  pace  and  trot — Gaits  analyzed — Saddle 
Horse  Register — Saddle  horse  progenitors — Denmark  not  a  thorough- 
bred horse 190-195 

CHAPTER  XVI. 

THE   WILD   HORSES   OF   AMERICA. 

The  romances  of  fifty  years  asro — Was  the  horse  indigenous  to  this  country? 
—The  theories  of  the  paleontologists  not  satisfactory — Pedigrees  of 
over  two  millions  of  years  too  Ion  — Outlines  of  horses  on  prehistoric 
ruins,  evidently  modern — The  linguistic  test  among  the  oldest  tribes 
of  Indians  fails  to  discover  any  word  for  "  Horse" — The  horses  aban- 
doned west  of  the  Mississippi  by  the  followers  of  De  Soto  about  1541 
were  the  progenitors  of  the  wild  horses  of  the  plains 196-204 


CONTENTS.  IX 

CHAPTER  XVII. 

MESSENGER  AND  HIS  ANCESTORS, 

PAGES 

Messenger  the  greatest  of  all  trotting  progenitors — Record  of  pedigrees  in 
English  Stud  Book — Pedigrees  made  from  unreliable  sources — Messen- 
ger's right  male  line  examined — Flying  Childers'  "mile  in  a  minute" 
— Blaze  short  of  being  thoroughbred — Sampson,  a  good  race  horse — 
His  size;  short  in  his  breeding — Engineer  short  also — Mambrino  was 
a  race  horse  with  at  least  two  pacing  crosses;  distinguished  as  a 
progenitor  of  coach  horses  and  fast  trotters — Messenger's  dam  cannot 
be  traced  nor  identified — Among  all  the  horses  claiming  to  be  thorough- 
bred he  is  the  only  one  that  founded  a  family  of  trotters — This  fact 
conceded  by  eminent  writers  in  attempting  to  find  others 205-221 

CHAPTER  XVIII. 

HISTORY  OF  MESSENGER. 

Messenger's  racing  in  England — His  breeder  unknown — Popular  uncer- 
tainty about  tbe  circumstances  and  date  of  his  importation — The  mat- 
ter settled  by  his  first  advertisement — Uncertainty  as  to  his  importer 
— Description  of  Messenger  by  David  W.  Jones,  of  Long  Island — Care- 
ful consensus  of  descriptions  by  many  who  had  seen  Messenger — His 
great  and  lasting  popularity  as  a  stock  horse — Places  and  prices  of  his 
services  for  twenty  years— Death  and  burial 222-231 

CHAPTER  XIX. 
MESSENGER'S  SONS. 

Hambletonian  (Bishop's)  pedigree  not  beyond  doubt — Cadwallader  R. 
Colden's  review  of  it — Ran  successfully — Taken  to  Granville,  X.  Y. — 
Some  of  his  descendants — Mambrino,  large  and  coarse  in  appearance — 
Failure  as  a  runner — Good  natural  trotter — His  most  famous  sons 
were  Abdallah,  Almack,  and  Mambrino  Paymaster — Winthrop  or 
Maine  Messenger  and  his  pedigree  and  history — Engineer  and  the 
tricks  of  his  owners — Certainly  a  son  of  Messenger — Commander — 
Bush  Messenger,  pedigree  and  descripion — Noted  as  the  sire  of  coach 
horses  and  trotters — Potomac — Tippoo  Saib — Sir  Solomon — Ogden 
Messenger,  dam  thoroughbred — Mambrino  (Grey) — Black  Messenger — 
Wbynot,  Saratoga,  Nestor,  Delight — Mount  Holly,  Plato,  Dover  Mes- 
senger, Coriander,  Fagdown,  Bright  Phoebus,  Slasher,  Shaftsbury, 
Hotspur,  Hutchinson  Messenger  and  Cooper's  Messenger — Abuse  of 
the  name  "  Messenger." 232-254 


CHAPTER   XX. 
MESSENGER'S  DESCENDANTS. 

History  of  Abdallah— Characteristics  of  his  dam,  Amazonia— Speculations 
as  to  her  blood — Description  of  Abdallah — Almack,  progenitor  of  the 
Champion  line — Mambrino  Paymaster,  sire  of  Mambrino  Chief — His- 
tory and  pedigree — Mambrino  Messenger — Harris'  Hambletonian — 
Judson's  Hambletonian — Andrus*  Hambletonian,  sire  of  the  famous 
Princess,  Happy  Medium's  dam 255-266 


x  CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER  XXI. 

HAMBLETONIAN   AND   HIS   FAMILY. 

PAGES 

The  greatest  progenitor  in  Horse  History— Mr.  Kellogg's  description,  and 
comments  thereupon — An  analysis  of  Hambletonian,  structurally  con- 
sidered— His  carriage  and  action — As  a  three-year-old  trotter — Details 
of  his  stud  service — Statistics  of  the  Hambletonian  family — History 
and  ancestry  of  his  dam,  the  Charles  Kent  Mare — Her  gratadson, 
Green's  Bashaw,  and  his  darn 267-283 

CHAPTER  XXII. 
HAMBLETONIAN'S  SONS  AND  GRANDSONS. 

Different  opinions  as  to  relative  merits  of  Hambletonian's  greater  sons — 
George  Wilkes,  his  history  and  pedigree — His  performing  descend- 
ants— History  and  description  of  Electioneer — His  family — Alexander's 
Abdallah  and  his  two  greatest  sons,  Almont  and  Belmont — Dictator — 
Harold — Happy  Medium  and  his  dam — Jay  Gould — Strathmore — 
Egbert — Aberdeen — Masterlode—  Sweepstakes — Governor  Sprague, 
grandson  of  Hambletonian 284-314 

CHAPTER  XXIII. 

MAMBRINO  CHIEF  AND  HIS  FAMILY. 

Description  and  history  of  Mambrino  Chief — The  pioneer  trotting  stallion 
of  Kentucky — Matched  against  Pilot  Jr. — His  best  sons — Mambrino 
Patchen,  his  opportunities  and  family — Woodford  Mambrino,  a  notable 
trotter  and  sire— Princeps — Mambrino  Pilot — Clark  Chief — Fisk's 
Mambrino  Chief  Jr.  —Ericsson 315-320 

CHAPTER  XXIV. 

THE   CLAYS   AND  BASHAWS. 

The  imported  Barb,  Grand  Bashaw — Young  Bashaw,  an  inferior  individual 
— His  greatest  son,  Andrew  Jackson — His  dam  a  trotter  and  pacer — 
His  history — His  noted  son,  Kemble  Jackson — Long  Island  Black 
Hawk — Henry  Clay,  founder  of  the  Clay  family — Cassius  M.  Clay — 
The  various  horses  named  Cassius  M.  Clay — George  M.  Patchen — His 
great  turf  career — George  M.  Patchen  Jr. — Harry  Clay — The  Moor, 
and  his  son  Sultan's  family 321-337 

CHAPTER  XXV. 

AMERICAN  STAR,    PILOT,    CHAMPION,    AND  NORMAN  FAMILIES. 

Seely's  American  Star — His  fictitous  pedigree — Breeding  really  unknown 
— A  trotter  of  some  merit — His  stud  career — His  daughters  noted 
brood  mares — Conklin's  American  Star — Old  Pacing  Pilot — History  and 
probable  origin — Pilot  Jr. — Pedigree — Training  and  races — Prepotency 
— Family  statistics  summarized — Grinnell's  Champion,  son  of  Almack 


— His  sons  and  performing 
sire,  the  Morse  Horse — S\v 


descendants — Alexander's  Norman  and  his 


orse — Swierert  and  Black  wood 338-851 


CONTENTS.  XL 

CHAPTER  XXVI. 

THE  BLUE  BULL  AND  OTHER  MINOR  FAMILIES. 

PAGES 

Blue  Bull,  the  once  leading  sire — His  lineage  and  history — His  family 
rank — The  Cadiuus  family — Pocahontas — Smuggler — Tom  Rolfe — 
Young  Rolfe  and  Nelson — The  Tom  Hal  Family — The  various  Tom 
Hals — Brown  Hal — The  Kentucky  Hunters — Flora  Temple — Edwin 
Forrest— The  Drew  Horse  and  his  descendants— The  Hiatogas 352-365 

CHAPTER  XXVII. 

THE  BLACK   HAWK,   OR  MORGAN  FAMILY. 

Characteristics  of  the  Morgans — History  of  the  original  Morgan — The 
fabled  pedigree — The  true  Briton  theory — Justin  Morgan's  breeding 
hopelessly  unknown — Sherman  Morgan — Black  Hawk — His  disputed 
paternity — His  dam  called  a  Narragansett — Ethan  Allen — His  great 
beauty,  speed,  and  popularity — The  Flying  Morgan  claim  baseless — 
His  dam  of  unknown  blood — His  great  race  with  Dexter — Daniel 
Lambert,  the  only  successful  sire  of  the  Black  Hawk  line 366-389- 

CHAPTER  XXVIII. 

THE  ORLOFF  TROTTER,  BELLFODNDER  AND  THE  ENGLISH  HACKNEY. 

Orloffs,  the  only  foreign  trotters  of  merit — Count  Alexis  Orloff,  founder  of 
the  breed — Origin  of  the  Orloff — Count  Orloff  began  breeding  in  1770 
— Smetanka,  Polkan,  and  Polkan's  son,  Barss,  really  the  first  Orloff 
trotting  sire — The  Russian  pacers — Their  great  speed — Imported  Bell- 
founder — His  history  and  characteristics — Got  little  speed — His 
descendants — The  English  Hackney — Not  a  breed,  but  a  mere  type — 
The  old  Norfolk  trotters — Hackney  experiments  in  America — Supe- 
riority of  the  trotting-bred  horse  demonstrated  in  show  ring  con- 
tests  390-408 

CHAPTER  XXIX. 

INVESTIGATION  OF  DISPUTED  PEDIGREES. 

Tendency  to  misrepresentation — The  Bald  Galloway  and  Darley  Arabian — 
Godolphin  Arabian — Early  experiences  with  trotting  pedigrees — Mr. 
Backman's  honest  methods — Shanghai  Mary — Capt.  Rynders  and 
Widow  Machree — Woodburn  Farm  and  its  pedigree  methods — Victim- 
ized by  "horse  sharps"  and  pedigree  makers — Alleged  pedigree  of 
Pilot  Jr.  conclusively  overthrown  —  Pedigrees  of  Edwin  Forrest, 
Norman,  Bay  Chief  and  Black  Rose — Maud  S.  pedigree  exhaustively 
considered — Captain  John  W.  Russell  never  owned  the  mare  Maria 
Russell— The  deadly  parallel  columns  settle  it 409-431 

CHAPTER  XXX. 

INVESTIGATION   OF  DISPUTED  PEDIGREES  (Continued). 

How  Belle  of  Wabash  got  her  pedigree — Specimen  of  pedigree  making  in 
that  day  and  locality — Search  for  the  dam  of  Thomas  Jefferson — True 
origin  and  history  of  Belle  of  Wabash — Facts  about  the  old-time 
gelding  Prince — The  truth  about  Waxy,  the  grandam  of  Sunol — 
Remarkable  attempts  to  make  a  pedigree 'out  of  nothing — How  "Jim" 


Xll  CONTENTS. 

PAGES 

Eoff  worked  a  "tenderfoot" — Pedigree  of  American  Eclipse — Pedigree 
of  Boston — Tom  Bowling  and  Aaron  Pennington — Cbenery's  Grey 
Eagle — Pedigree  of  George  Wilkes  in  doubt 433-455 

CHAPTER  XXXI. 

HOW   THE  TROTTING  HORSE  IS  BRED. 

Early  trotting  t.nd  pacing  races — Strains  of  blood  in  the  first  known  trot- 
ters— The  lesson  of  Maud  S. — The  genesis  of  trotting  horse  literature 
— The  simple  study  of  inheritance — The  different  forms  of  heredity — 
The  famous  quagga  story  not  sustained — Illustrations  in  dogs — Hered- 
ity of  acquired  characters  and  instincts — Development  of  successive 
generations  necessary — Unequal ed  collections  of  statistics — Acquired 
injuries  and  unsoundness  transmitted 456-479 

CHAPTER  XXXII. 

HOW   THE  TROTTING   HORSE   IS   BRED  (Continued). 

Trotting  speed  first  supposed  to  be  an  accident — Then,  that  it  came  from 
the  runner — William  Wheelan's  views — Test  of  powers  of  endurance 
— The  term  "  thoroughbred"  much  abused — Definition  of  "thorough- 
bred" — How  trotters  may  be  made  "  thoroughly  bred" — How  to  study 
pedigrees — Reward  offered  for  the  production  of  a  thoroughbred  horse 
that  was  a  natural  pacer — The  trotter  more  lasting  than  the  runner — 
The  dam  of  Palo  Alto — Arion  as  a  two-year-old — Only  three  stallions 
have  been  able  to  get  trotters  from  running-bred  mares — "  Structural 
incongruity" — The  pacer  and  trotter  inseparable — How  to  save  the  trot 
and  reduce  the  ratio  of  pacers— Development  a  necessity — Table  prov- 
ing this  proposition — The  "tin  cup"  policy  a  failure — Woodburn  at 
the  wrong  end  of  the  procession 480-507 

CHAPTER  XXXIII. 

HOW  THE  TROTTING   HORSE  IS  BRED  (Continued). 

Breeding  the  trotter  intelligently  an  industry  of  modern  development — 
Plethora  of  turf  papers,  and  their  timidity  of  the  truth — The  accepted 
theories,  old  and  new — Failure  of  the  "thoroughbred  blood  in  the 
trotter"  idea — "Thoroughbred  foundations,"  and  the  Register — 
"  Like  begets  like,"  the  great  central  truth — Long-continued  efforts 
to  breed  trotters  from  runners — New  York  the  original  source  of 
supply  of  trotting  blood  to  all  the  States— Kentucky's  beginning  in 
breeding  trotters — R.  A.  Alexander,  and  the  founding  of  Woodburn 
— The  "infallibility"  of  Woodburn  pedigrees — Refusal  to  enter  fic- 
titious crosses  in  the  Register  and  the  results — The  genesis  and 
history  of  the  standard — Its  objects,  effects,  and  influence — Establish- 
ing the  breed  of  trotters — The  Kentucky  or  "Pinafore"  standard — 
Its  purposes  analyzed— The  "Breeders'  Trotting  Stud  Book"  and 
how  it  was  compiled — Failure  and  collapse  of  the  Kentucky  project 
— Another  unsuccessful  attempt  to  capture  the  Register — How 
honest  administration  of  the  Register  made  enemies— The  National 
Breeders' Association  and  the  Chicago  Convention — Detailed  history  of 
the  sale  and  transfer  of  the  Register,  the  events  that  led  up  to  it, 
and  the  results — Personal  satisfaction  and  benefits  from  the  transfer,' 
and  the  years  of  rest  and  congenial  study  in  preparing  this  book — 
The  end 508-546 


CONTENTS.  Xlll 

APPENDIX. 

HISTORY  OP  THE  WALLACE  PUBLICATIONS. 

By  a  Friend  of  the  Author. 

PAGES 

Mr.  Wallace's  early  life  and  education — Removal  to  Iowa,  1845 — Secretary 
Iowa  State  Board  of  Agriculture — Begins  work,  1856,  on  "  Wallace's 
American  Stud  Book,"  published  1867 — Method  of  gathering  pedigrees 
— Trotting  Supplement — Abandons  Stud  Book,  1870,  and  devotes  ex- 
clusive attention  to  trotting  literature — "American  Trotting  Reg- 
ister," Vol.  I.,  published  in  1871— Vol.  II.  follows  in  1874— The 
valuable  essay  on  breeding  the  forerunner  of  present  ideas — Standard 
adopted  1879— Its  history — Battles  for  control  of  the  "Register" — 
WcMace's  Monthly  founded  1875 — Its  character,  purposes,  history, 
writers,  and  artists — "Wallace's  Year  Book"  founded  1885 — Great 
popularity  and  value — Transfer  of  the  Wallace  publications,  and  their 
degeneration 547-559 


ILLUSTRATIONS. 


PORTRAIT  OP  THE  AUTHOR Frontispiece. 

MAP  OF  ARMENIA,  CAPPADOCIA,  SYRIA,  ETC To  face  page    24 

MAP  OF  PHCENICIAN  COLONIES  AND  THE  MEDITERRANEAN.  . .  "  ««       36 

GODOLPHIN  ARABIAN,  TRUE  PORTRAIT) 

>•  In  one  view "  "        67 

GODOLPHIN  ARABIAN,  DISTORTED ) 

STAR  POINTER,  THE  CHAMPION  PACER.     (1:59±) "  "     155 

JOHN  R.  GENTRY,  PACER.     (2:00*) "  "     178 

ALIX,  THE  PRESENT  CHAMPION  TROTTER.    (2:03±) "  "255 

HAMBLETONIAN  (RYSDYK'S) "  "     267 

GEORGE  WILKES,  SON  OF  HAMBLETONIAN "  "     284 

ELECTIONEER,  SON  OF  HAMBLETONIAN "  "     289 

ABDALLAH  (ALEXANDER'S),  SON  OF  HAMBLETONIAN "  "     294 

NANCY  HANKS,  BY  HAPPY  MEDIUM.     (2:04) "  "     306 

ETHAN  ALLEN,  BY  VERMONT  BLACK  HAWK "  "     381 


NOTE.—  Nine  of  the  above  engravings  have  been  reproduced,  by  permission,  from  the 
Portfolio  issued  by  The  Horse  Review. 


THE  HORSE  OF  AMERICA. 


CHAPTEE  I. 

INTRODUCTION. 
General  View  of  the  Field  Traversed. 

Ix  undertaking  to  fulfill  a  promise  made  years  ago,  to  write  a 
history  of  the  American  Trotting  Horse  and  his  ancestors,  I  am 
met  with  the  inquiry:  What  were  his  ancestors  and  whence  did 
they  come?  To  say  that  the  American  Trotter,  the  phenomenal 
horse  of  this  century,  is  descended  from  a  certain  horse  imported 
from  England  in  1788,  does  not  fully  meet  the  requirements  of 
the  truth,  for  there  are  other  and  very  distinctive  elements 
embodied  in  his  inheritance  that  are  not  indebted  to  that  partic- 
ular imported  horse.  In  searching  for  these  undefined  elements, 
I  have  found  myself  in  the  fields  of  antiquity,  reaching  out  step 
by  step,  further  and  further,  until  the  utmost  boundaries  of  all 
history,  sacred  and  profane,  were  clearly  in  view.  There  I  found 
a  field  that  was  especially  attractive  because  it  was  a  new  field, 
and  the  relations  of  the  peoples  of  the  earliest  ages  to  their  horses 
had  never  been  investigated  nor  discussed.  Having  no  engage- 
ments nor  necessities  to  hurry  me,  the  careful  exploration  of  this 
hitherto  unknown  territory  has  afforded  me  very  great  enjoy- 
ment. 

As  the  result  of  these  investigations,  the  breadth  and  scope  of 
this  volume  will  be  greatly  widened,  touching  upon  the  originals 
of  most  of  the  lighter  types  of  horses,  and  many  of  the  idols  of 
the  imagination  will  be  demolished.  The  objective  point  is  the 
history  of  the  Trotting  Horse,  but  before  reaching  that  point  we 
must  consider  the  beginnings  of,  practically,  nearly  all  the  vari- 
eties of  horses  in  the  world.  The  assistance  that  I  may  be  able 
to  gain  from  modern  writers  will  be  very  limited,  and  restricted 


4  THE   HOUSE   OF   AMEKICA. 

Haicus,  the  great  grandson  of  Japheth,  became  the  ruler  of  his 
people.  Descending  from  him,  in  the  direct  male  line,  there 
were  five  or  six  long  reigns  before  the  dynasty  was  overthrown 
by  the  Assyrians.  They  were  largely  an  agricultural  people,  and 
the  ancient  historians  have  told  us  they  were  famous  for  the 
great  numbers  and  fine  quality  of  the  horses  they  produced.  The 
market  for  their  horses,  the  prophet  Ezekiel  tells  us,  was  in  the 
great  commercial  city  of  Tyre,  whence  they  were  carried  "in  the 
ships  of  Tarshish"  by  the  Phoanician  merchants  to  all  portions  of 
the  known  world.  Having  here  reached  back  to  the  Noachic 
period  and  country,  with  all  that  this  implies,  I  will  leave  the 
problem,  with  the  more  extended  consideration  that  will  be 
given  it  in  the  chapter  on  the  general  distribution  of  horses  in  all 
parts  of  the  commercial  world. 

Horsemen  of  average  intelligence  and  writers  on  the  horse, 
oftentimes  much  below  average  intelligence  in  horse  matters,  all 
seem  to  unite  on  the  Arabian  horse  as  their  fetish,  when  in  fact 
they  know  nothing  about  him.  The  songs  of  the  poets  and  the 
stories  of  the  novelists  have  taken  the  place,  in  the  minds  of  the 
people  of  all  nations,  of  solid  history  and  sober  experience.  When 
a  story  writer  wishes  to  depict  an  athletic  and  daring  hero,  he 
never  fails  to  mount  him  upon  an  "Arab  steed,"  when  some 
blood-curdling  adventures  are  to  be  disclosed.  When  Admiral 
Rons,  the  great  racing  authority  in  England,  announced  some 
years  ago,  that  the  English  race  horse  was  purely  descended  from 
the  horses  of  Arabia  Deserta,  without  one  drop  of  plebeian 
blood,  all  England  believed  him,  and  this  rash  and  groundless 
dictum  has  served  all  writers  as  conclusive  evidence  ever  since. 
Now,  it  is  not  probable  that  more  than  two  or  at  most  three  per 
cent,  of  the  blood  of  the  English  race  horse  as  he  stands  to-day  is 
Arabian  blood.  The  greatness  and  value  of  the  Arabian  horse  is 
purely  mythical.  He  has  been  tested  hundreds  of  times,  both  on 
the  course  and  in  the  stud,  and  in  every  single  instance  he  has 
proved  a  failure.  This  is  what  all  history  and  experience  teach. 
There  are  but  few  horses  bred  in  Arabia  and  there  are,  compara- 
tively, but  few  there  now.  From  the  time  of  their  first  intro- 
duction into  Yemen — Arabia  Felix — up  to  the  time  of  Mohammed, 
about  two  hundred  and  seventy  years,  they  were  still  very  scarce. 
Mohammed  was  not  a  horseman  nor  a  horse  breeder,  nor  is  it  known 
that  he  ever  mounted  a  horse  but  once,  and  then  he  had  but  two 
in  his  army.  When  he  made  his  first  pilgrimage  to  Mecca  he  rode 


GENERAL   VIEW    OF   THE    FIELD.  5 

a  camel;  and  when  he  went  the  second  time  in  triumph,  mounted 
on  a  camel,  he  made  the  requisite  number  of  circuits  round  the 
holy  place,  then  dismounted  and  broke  the  idols  that  had  been 
set  up  there.  Then  came  the  triumphant  shout  of  his  followers; 
* 'There  is  no  God  but  Allah  and  Mohammed  is  his  prophet." 
Since  then,  this  cry  has  rung  over  a  thousand  battlefields,  and 
as  I  write  it  is  still  heard  in  the  homes  of  the  slaughtered  Arme- 
nians. From  a  great,  warlike,  and  conquering  people,  the  fol- 
lowers of  Mohammed  have  degenerated  into  an  aggregation  of 
robbers  and  murderers  of  defenseless  Christians.  Since  the  days 
of  Mohammed,  horses  no  doubt  have  increased  in  numbers,  but 
all  modern  travelers  express  their  surprise  at  the  small  numbers 
they  see.  The  horse  is  an  expensive  luxury  in  Arabia,  and  none 
but  the  rich  can  afford  to  keep  him.  He  fills  no  economic  place 
in  the  domestic  life  of  the  Arab,  for  he  is  never  used  for  any  pur- 
pose except  display  and  robbery.  Nobody  is  able  to  own  a  horse 
but  the  sheiks  and  a  few  wealthy  men.  Nobody  would  think  of 
mounting  a  horse  for  a  journey,  be  it  long  or  short.  The  camel 
fills  the  place  of  the  horse,  the  cow  and  a  flock  of  sheep,  all  in 
one,  and  surely  the  Arabs  are  right  in  saying,  "Job's  beast  is  a 
monument  of  God's  mercy."  It  is  very  evident  that  nearly  all 
the  horses  said  to  have  been  brought  from  Arabia  never  saw 
Arabia.  As  an  illustration  of  the  uncertainty  of  what  a  man  is 
getting  when  he  thinks  he  is  buying  an  Arabian,  in  the  Orient,  I 
will  give,  in  some  detail  the  experiences  of  Mr.  Wilfrid  S. 
Blunt,  a  wealthy  Englishman  who  had  an  ambition  to  regenerate 
the  English  race  horse  by  bringing  in  fresh  infusions  of  Arabian 
blood.  He  went  to  Arabia  to  buy  the  best,  but  he  didn't  go  into 
Arabia  to  find  it.  He  skirted  along  through  the  border  land 
where  agriculture  and  civilization  prevailed,  while  away  off  to  the 
south  the  wild  tribes  roamed  over  the  desert,  and  to  the  north, 
not  far  away,  was  the  land  of  abundance  that  had  been  famous 
for  more  than  three  thousand  years  for  the  great  numbers  and 
excellence  of  the  horses  bred  there.  Here  on  the  banks  of  the 
Euphrates  Mr.  Blunt  found  the  town  of  Deyr,  and  he  soon  dis- 
covered it  was  a  famous  horse  market.  The  inhabitants  were  the 
only  people  he  met  with  who  seemed  to  understand  and  appre- 
ciate the  value  of  pedigrees,  and  there  were  no  horses  in  the  town 
but  "thoroughbreds."  Here  Mr.  Blunt  made  nearly  all  his  pur- 
chases which  amounted  to  eighteen  mares  and  two  stallions  "at 
reasonable  prices."  As  will  be  seen  in  the  extracts  from  his  book, 


6  THE    HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

he  was  strikingly  solicitous  that  the  friends  at  home  should  have 
no  doubt  about  the  quality  of  the  stock  he  purchased  being  all 
"thoroughbred."  No  doubt  he  realized  the  awkwardness  of  the 
location  as  not  the  right  one  in  which  to  secure  "thoroughbred" 
Arabians  and  hence  the  vigorous  indorsement  of  the  honesty  of 
the  "slick  and  experienced"  dealers  as  honest  men  and  true  de- 
scendants of  the  Bedouins  of  the  desert.  In  this  "he  doth 
protest  too  much"  and  thus  suggests  that  while  the  pedigrees 
came  from  the  tribes  of  the  desert  to  the  South,  it  might  be  pos- 
sible that  the  horses  came  from  the  farmers  who  bred  them  to  the 
North.  However  this  may  have  been,  the  whole  enterprise 
turned  out  to  be  a  flat  failure,  and  after  a  number  of  years  spent 
in  begging  for  popular  support,  the  whole  collection  was  dispersed 
under  the  hammer  of  the  auctioneer,  not  realizing  a  tithing  of 
the  cost. 

While  it  is  not  necessary  that  I  should  express  any  opinion  as 
to  whether  Mr.  Blunt  was  deceived  in  the  breeding  of  the  animals 
which  he  brought  home,  I  will  make  brief  allusion  to  an  Amer- 
ican experience  which  is  more  fully  considered  elsewhere.  Some 
forty  or  more  years  ago  Mr.  A.  Keene  Richards,  a  breeder  of  race 
horses  in  Kentucky,  became  impressed  with  the  idea  that  the  way 
to  improve  the  race  horse  of  America  was  to  introduce  direct  in- 
fusions of  the  blood  of  Arabia.  He  did  not  hesitate,  but  he 
started  to  Arabia  and  brought  home  some  horses  and  mares  and 
put  them  to  breeding.  The  pure  bloods  could  not  run  at  all  and 
the  half-breeds  were  too  slow  to  make  the  semblance  of  a  contest 
with  Kentucky-bred  colts.  He  concluded  that  he  had  been 
cheated  by  the  rascally  Arabs  in  the  blood  they  put  upon  him. 
He  then  determined  to  go  back  and  get  the  right  blood,  and  as  a 
counselor  he  took  with  him  the  famous  horse  painter,  Troye, 
who  was  thoroughly  up  on  anatomy  and  structure.  They  went 
into  the  very  heart  of  Arabia  and  spent  many  weeks  among  the 
different  tribes  of  the  desert.  They  had  greatly  the  advantage  of 
Mr.  Blunt  or  any  other  amateur,  for  they  were  experienced  horse- 
men and  knew  just  what  they  were  doing.  AVhen  they  were 
ready  to  start  home  they  believed  they  had  found  and  secured 
the  very  best  horses  that  Arabia  had  produced.  When  the 
produce  of  this  second  importation  were  old  enough  to  run  it  was 
found  that  they  were  no  better  than  the  first  lot,  and  thus  all  the 
bright  dreams  of  enthusiasm  were  dissipated.  Thus  was  demon- 
strated for  the  thousandth  time  that  the  blood  of  even  the  best 


GENERAL   VIEW   OF   THE    FIELD.  7 

and  purest  Arabian  horse,  is  a  detriment  and  hindrance  rather 
than  a  benefit  to  the  modern  race  horse.  Mr.  Richards,  with  all 
his  practical  knowledge  and  experience,  was  no  more  successful 
than  the  amateur,  Mr.  Blunt.  The  blood  which  Mr.  Richards 
brought  home  was,  no  doubt,  purer  and  more  fashionable,  as  esti- 
mated in  the  desert,  than  that  brought  home  by  Mr.  Blunt,  but 
when  tested  by  modern  advancement  it  was  no  better. 

A  careful  study  of  the  chapter  on  the  English  Race  Horse  will 
present  to  the  minds  of  all  my  intelligent  readers  the  considera- 
tion of  several  points  to  which  they  will  be  slow  in  yielding 
assent.  These  points  run  up  squarely  against  the  preconceived 
opinions  and  prejudices  of  two  centuries,  and  these  preconceived 
opinions  and  prejudices  are  well-nigh  universal.  The  first  point 
upon  which  the  public  intelligence  has  gone  wrong  is  in  the 
general  belief  that  horse-racing  had  its  origin  in  the  seven- 
teenth century,  when  Charles  II.  was  restored  to  his  throne. 
The  truth  is  we  have  accounts  of  racing  by  contemporaneous  his- 
torians in  the  twelfth  century,  and  indeed,  we  might  say  from  the 
time  of  the  Romans  in  Britain.  To  go  back  four  centuries,  how- 
ever, is  far  enough  to  answer  our  present  purpose.  After  select- 
ing, breeding,  and  racing  four  hundred  years  we  must  conclude 
that  the  English  had  some  pretty  good  race  horses.  This  is 
fully  verified  by  the  writers  at  the  close  of  Queen  Elizabeth's 
reign  as  well  as  at  the  beginning  of  Charles  II. 's.  They  had  native 
English  horses  that  were  able  to  beat  all  the  imported  exotics,  in- 
cluding the  Arabian  owned  by  King  James.  We  must,  therefore, 
conclude  that  the  race  horse  was  not  created  by  Charles  II.,  but 
that  racing  was  simply  revived  by  him,  after  the  restrictions  of 
Cromwell's  time,  and  that  the  old  English  blood  was  the  basis  of 
that  revival.  The  importations  of  so  many  exotics  in  his  reign 
were  simply  so  many  reinforcements  of  the  old  English  racing 
blood. 

The  next  point  to  which  exception  will  be  taken  is  the  con- 
clusion reached  as  to  the  character  and  influence  of  the  exotics 
that  were  introduced  in  the  reign  of  Charles  II.  These  exotics 
have  been  designated  in  a  general  way,  by  the  phrase  "foundation 
stock,"  which  has  been  introduced  more  out  of  deference  to 
the  popular  understanding  than  to  its  legitimate  and  true 
meaning.  For  the  real  "foundation  stock"  we  must  look  away 
back  in  the  centuries,  long  before  Charles  was  born.  The 
analysis  of  the  data  furnished  by  Mr.  Weatherby  as  "foun- 


8  THE   HOKSE   OF   AMEKICA. 

dation  stock"  clearly  shows  that  the  Turks  predominated  in 
numbers,  but,  possibly,  the  Barbs  in  influence.  The  Arabian 
element,  in  both  numbers  and  influence,  seems  to  be  practically 
nil,  and  this  is  the  "gist  of  my  offending."  The  one  great  horse 
— Godolphin  Arabian — exerted  a  greater  and  more  lasting  influ- 
ence upon  the  English  race  horse  than  any  other  of  his  century 
and  probably  than  all  the  others  of  his  century,  and  his  blood  is 
wholly  unknown.  Fortunately,  a  few  years  ago  I  was  able  to 
unearth  his  portrait  and  prove  it  a  true  portrait,  and  in  that 
picture  we  must  look  for  his  lineage.  He  was  a  horse  of  great 
substance  and  strength  on  short  legs,  with  no  resemblance  what- 
ever to  a  race  horse.  About  fifty  years  after  his  death  Mr. 
Stubbs,  the  artist,  who  prided  himself  upon  representing  the 
character  of  a  horse  rather  than  his  shape,  came  across  this 
picture,  from  which  he  made  an  "ideal"  copy  of  what  he  thought 
the  horse  should  have  been,  which  is  a  veritable  monstrosity. 
These  two  pictures  will  appear  together  in  their  proper  places, 
where  they  can  be  leisurely  studied,  and  the  honest  and  the  dis- 
honest compared. 

The  American  race  horse  is  the  lineal  descendent  of  the  English 
race  horse,  and  like  his  ancestor  he  is  very  largely  dependent  upon 
the  "native  blood"  for  his  existence  as  a  breed.  The  first 
English  race  horse  was  imported  into  Virginia  about  1750,  and 
he  there  met  a  class  of  saddle  mares  that  had  been  selected,  bred, 
trained,  and  raced  at  all  distances  up  to  four-mile  heats,  for  nearly 
a  hundred  years.  These  mares  were  the  real  maternal  founda- 
tion stock  upon  which  the  American  race  horse  was  established, 
as  a  breed.  The  phrase  "native  blood"  is  here  used  as  applying 
to  the  animals  and  their  descendants,  that  were  brought  over 
from  England  at  and  soon  after  the  plantation  of  the  American 
colonies.  Up  to  the  time  of  the  Revolution  there  were  but  few 
racing  mares  brought  over — as  many  as  you  could  count  on  your 
fingers — but  they  must  have  been  marvelously  prolific,  for  thirty 
or  forty  filly  foals  each  would  hardly  have  accommodated  all  the 
animals  with  pedigrees  tracing  to  them.  Quite  a  number  of  our 
greatest  race  horses  and  sires  of  forty  or  fifty  years  ago  traced  to 
some  one  of  these  mares  through  links  that  were  wholly  fictitious. 
Indeed,  from  the  period  of  the  Revolution,  and  even  before  that, 
down  to  our  own  time,  the  pernicious  and  dishonest  habit  of 
adding  fictitious  crosses  beyond  the  second  or  third  dam  became 
Ihe  rule  in  the  old  American  families,  and  an  animal  with  a  strictly 


GENERAL  YIEW   OF   THE    FIELD.  9 

honest  pedigree  was  the  exception.  In  spreading  abroad  these 
dishonest  fictions  as  true  pedigrees,  the  press — perhaps  not 
venally,  but  ignorantly — was  made  the  active  agent.  Whenever 
a  rogue  could  get  a  pedigree  into  print,  however  absurd,  nothing 
could  prevent  its  spread  as  the  truth.  The  early  sporting  and 
breeding  press  was  not  in  the  hands  of  men  remarkable  for  con- 
science and  still  less  remarkable  for  knowledge.  But  the  worst 
of  all  was  the  "professional  pedigree  maker"  who  knew  so  many 
things  that  he  never  knew,  and  stopped  at  nothing.  In  all  this 
dirty  work  of  manufacturing  pedigrees  there  is  a  very  striking 
resemblance  between  the  awkward  efforts  of  the  early  English 
and  the  early  American  pedigree  maker.  This  whole  topic  of  the 
ignorance  of  the  press  and  the  dishonesty  of  the  pedigree  makers 
will  be  considered  fully  in  its  proper  place.  Fortunately,  al- 
though still  far  from  perfect,  the  methods  and  care  in  the  pres- 
ervation of  the  true  lineage  of  the  race  horse  in  our  own  day 
have  been  greatly  improved.  The  many  efforts  to  improve  the 
American  race  horse  by  introducing  fresh  infusions  of  Saracenic 
blood  will  receive  due  attention,  especially  as  they  have  nearly  all 
been  made  within  the  newspaper  period,  and  their  uniform  and 
complete  failure  will  not  be  new  to  American  horsemen. 

When  we  reach  the  horses  of  the  colonial  period,  we  are  in  a 
field  that  never  has  been  explored  and  cannot  be  expected  to  yield 
a  very  rich  harvest.  Here  and  there  I  have  been  able  to  pick  up 
a  detached  paragraph  from  some  contemporaneous  writer,  and 
occasionally  a  record,  or  an  advertisement,  from  which,  in  most 
cases,  I  have  been  able  to  construct  a  fair  and  truthful  outline 
and  description  of  the  horses  of  the  different  colonies,  down  to 
the  Eevolutionary  war.  The  collection  of  the  material  has  re- 
quired great  patience  and  great  labor,  but  it  has  not  been  an  irk- 
some task,  for  many  things  have  been  brought  to  light  of  great 
interest  to  the  student  of  horse  history.  The  knowledge  of  the 
colonial  horse  in  his  character  and  action,  that  may  be  gathered 
from  the  chapters  devoted  to  his  description  and  history,  I  flatter 
myself,  will  not  only  be  interesting  as  something  new,  but  will 
throw  a  strong  light  on  the  lineage  of  the  two-minute  trotter  and 
pacer. 

The  colonists  of  Virginia  were  subjected  for  a  number  of  years 
to  great  suffering,  privation,  and  want.  They  were  badly  selected 
and  many  of  them  were  improvident  and  never  trained  to  habits 
of  industry  and  thrift.  There  were  quite  too  many  "penniless 


10  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

gentlemen's  sons"  among  them,,  who  had  been  sent  out  with  the 
hope  that  the  change  might  improve  their  habits  and  their 
morals.  They  were  too  proud  to  work,  and  when  they  were  driven 
to  it  by  necessity  they  didn't  know  how.  After  suffering  untold 
hardships  for  a  succession  of  years,  those  that  survived  learned 
to  adapt  themselves  to  their  environment  and  to  make  their  own 
way  in  the  world.  Their  first  supply  of  domestic  animals  were 
all  consumed  as  food,  embracing  horses,  cattle,  swine,  and  goats, 
and  everything  had  thus  been  consumed  except  one  venerable 
female  swine,  as  reported  by  a  board  of  examiners.  Their  second 
supply  of  horses,  cattle,  swine,  and  goats  was  more  carefully 
guarded,  and  from  them  in  greater  part  came  the  countless  deni- 
zens of  the  barnyard. 

There  were  several  shipments  of  horses  at  different  times,  by 
the  proprietors  in  London,  down  till  about  1620  and  possibly 
later,  but  they  do  not  seem  to  have  increased  very  rapidly,  for  in 
1646  all  the  horses  in  the  colony  were  estimated  at  about  two 
hundred  of  both  sexes.  This  estimate  was  probably  too  low,  for 
ten  years  after  this  the  exportation  of  mares  was  forbidden  by 
legislative  enactment,  and  eleven  years  later  this  restriction  was 
removed,  and  both  sexes  could  then  be  exported.  From  this 
legislation  and  from  writers  who  visited  the  colony  we  learn  that 
horses  were  very  plenty,  and  they  are  described  as  of  excellent 
quality,  hardy  and  strong,  but  under  size.  It  was  the  custom  in 
Virginia,  and  indeed  in  all  the  other  colonies  at  that  period  and 
for  long  afterward,  to  brand  their  young  horses  and  turn  them 
out  to  hustle  for  their  own  living.  They  increased  with  wonder- 
ful rapidity  and  great  numbers  became  as  wild  and  as  wary  of 
the  habitation  and  sight  of  man  as  the  deer  of  the  forest.  About 
the  close  of  the  seventeenth  century  the  chasing  and  capture  of 
wild  horses  in  Virginia  became  a  legitimate  and  not  always  an 
unprofitable  sport,  for  an  animal  caught  without  a  brand  became 
the  unquestioned  property  of  his  captor.  It  is  a  noteworthy  fact 
that  off  the  coast  of  Virginia  the  island  of  Chincoteague  has 
been  occupied  for  probably  two  hundred  years  by  large  bands  of 
wild  horses.  They  are  still  there,  and  not  till  within  the  last  few 
decades  have  there  been  any  efforts  made  to  domesticate  some 
selections  from  them.  They  are  of  all  colors,  but  quite  uniform 
in  size,  not  averaging  much  over  thirteen  hands,  with  clean  limbs, 
and  many  of  them  are  pacers.  There  is  only  one  way  to  account 
for  them  in  that  location,  and  that  is,  that  they  were  originally  a 


GEXERAL   VIEW   OF   THE   FIELD.  11 

band  of  Virginia  wild  horses  that  wandered  or  was  chased  out 
onto  this  sandy  peninsula,  and  while  there  some  great  storm  set 
the  mysterious  ocean  currents  at  work  and  cut  off  their  retreat  by 
converting  a  peninsula  into  an  island,  and  there  they  have  lived 
and  multiplied  ever  since. 

The  colonial  horses  of  Virginia  were  of  all  colors  and  all  very 
small  in  size,  as  we  would  class  them  in  our  day.  An  examina- 
tion of  a  great  many  advertisements  of  "Strayed,"  "Taken  up," 
etc.,  of  the  period  of  about  1750,  clearly  establishes  the  fact  that 
at  that  time  the  average  height  was  a  small  fraction  over  thirteen 
hands  and  one  inch.  More  were  described  as  just  thirteen  hands 
than  any  other  size,  and  they  were  nearly  all  between  thirteen 
and  fourteen.  From  this  same  advertising  source  I  was  able  to 
glean  conclusive  evidence  as  to  their  habits  of  action,  and  found 
that  just  two-thirds  of  them  were  natural  pacers  and  one-third 
natural  trotters.  Thus  for  more  than  a  hundred  years  they  had 
retained  the  peculiarities  of  their  English  ancestors  in  the  reign 
of  James  I.,  in  color,  size,  and  gait.  This  in  no  way  differs  from 
the  description  of  the  Chincoteague  Island  ponies  of  to-day.  As 
early  as  1686  a  law  was  enacted  that  all  stallions  less  than  thir- 
teen and  a  half  hands  high  found  running  at  large  should  be 
forfeited;  but  this,  like  Henry  VIII. 'slaws  in  the  same  direction, 
had  failed  to  increase  the  average  size  of  the  horses.  From  the 
indomitable  passion  for  horse-racing  which  prevailed  universally 
among  the  colonists,  we  may  safely  conclude  that  some  animals 
were  carefully  selected  and  coupled  with  a  view  to  the  speed  of 
the  progeny,  both  at  the  gallop  and  at  the  pace,  but  the  great 
mass  were  allowed  to  roam  at  large,  and  under  such  conditions 
no  variety  or  tribe  of  horses  has  ever  improved  in  size,  or  indeed 
in  any  other  quality. 

The  early  horses  of  the  Dutch  colony  of  New  Netherlands, 
afterward  New  York,  were  brought  from  Utrecht  in  Holland. 
As  we  would  look  at  them  to-day,  they  were  small,  but  they  were 
larger  and  better,  and  brought  higher  prices  than  the  English 
horses  of  the  Eastern  colonies  or  than  the  Swedish  on  the  West. 
It  was  conceded,  however,  that  for  the  saddle  they  were  not  so 
good  as  the  New  England  horses,  and  hence  it  may  be  inferred 
that  they  were  not  pacers.  It  is  very  evident,  however,  that  the 
two  breeds  were  soon  mixed,  as  the  saddle  was  then  the  universal 
means  of  travel,  whether  for  long  or  short  distances.  During 
the  time  of  the  Kevolutionary  war  a  large  accumulation  of  data 


12  THE   HOUSE   OF   AMERICA. 

bearing  on  the  size  and  action  of  the  horses  of  that  period  goes 
to  show  that  the  average  size  had  then  increased  to  fourteen 
hands  and  one  inch,  and  in  gait  fifteen  both  paced  and  trotted, 
nine  trotted  only,  and  seven  paced  only.  It  is  not  pretended 
that  these  data  represent  the  horses  of  the  early  colonial  period, 
but  only  of  the  period  above  indicated.  Strains  of  larger  breeds 
had  been* introduced,  but  the  little  New  England  pacer  had  made 
his  mark  on  the  habits  of  action. 

In  1665,  the  next  year  after  the  Dutch  had  surrendered  the 
country  to  the  English,  Governor  Nicolls  established  a  race-course 
on  Hempstead  Plains  and  offered  prizes  for  the  fleetest  runners, 
and  his  successors  kept  up  annual  meetings  on  that  course  for 
many  years.  This  was  the  first  official  and  regularly  organized 
race-course  that  we  have  any  trace  of  in  this  country.  These 
meetings  seem  to  have  been  well  supported  from  the  very  first  by 
both  town  and  country,  and  as  the  people  were  then  practically 
all  Dutch,  it  is  a  fair  inference  that  the  horses  engaged  in  the 
races  were  Dutch  horses.  This  was  before  the  English  race  horse 
had  reached  the  character  of  a  breed,  and  a  hundred  years  before 
the  first  of  that  breed  was  imported  into  New  York.  From  this 
beginning  many  tracks  were  constructed  or  improvised  in  and 
about  the  city,  upon  which  racing  at  all  forms  and  at  all  gaits  has 
been  carried  on  to  the  present  day.  When  honestly  conducted 
the  sport  has  always  been  favorably  received  by  reputable  people; 
but  at  successive  periods  it  has  degenerated  into  a  mere  carnival 
of  gambling  that  placed  it  under  a  ban. 

The  horses  of  the  New  England  colonies  fill  a  very  important 
place  in  the  horse  history  of  the  country.  This  is  especially  true 
of  a  remarkable  tribe  of  swift  pacers,  produced  in  Ehode  Island 
and  known  throughout  the  whole  country  as  the  "Narragansett 
Pacers."  To  the  description  of  these  a  special  chapter  will  be 
devoted.  The  first  horses  imported  into  New  England  reached 
Boston  harbor  in  1629  and  were  sent  direct  from  England  by  the 
proprietary  company  in  London.  The  same  year  a  small  consign- 
ment reached  Salem.  The  next  year  about  sixty  head  were 
shipped  to  the  plantation,  but  many  of  them  were  lost  on  the 
voyage.  In  1635  two  Dutch  ships  landed  at  Salem  with  twenty- 
seven  mares  and  three  stallions,  and  were  sold  there  at  remuner- 
ative prices.  Other  shipments  followed,  no  doubt,  that  have  not 
been  noted.  In  1640  the  colonists  seem  to  have  been  supplied 
with  all  the  horses  they  needed,  for  that  year  they  shipped  a 


GENERAL   VIEW    OF   THE   FIELD.  13 

cargo  of  eighty  head  to  the\Barbadoes.  From  these  importations 
into  Boston  and  Salem,  all  the  New  England  colonists  received 
their  supplies.  The  field  specially  gleaned  to  determine  the  size 
and  gaits  of  the  Massachusetts  horses  covered  the  years  1756-59, 
from  which  it  appears  that  the  average  height  was  then  fourteen 
hands  and  one  inch;  and  as  to  gait,  just  three-fourths  were 
pacers  and  one-fourth  trotters.  In  comparing  this  average  size 
with  the  Virginians  of  the  same  period  we  find  that  the  Massa- 
chusetts horses  were  about  one  hand  higher,  which  would 
indicate  the  influence  of  the  early  Dutch  blood.  Besides  this 
we  must  make  some  allowance  for  a  possible  different  habit  of 
estimating  size. 

When  the  plantation  was  made  at  Hartford,  Connecticut,  in 
1636,  the  planters  brought  their  horses  and  other  domestic  animals 
with  them.  In  1653  the  General  Court,  at  New  Haven,  made 
provision  for  keeping  public  saddle  horses  for  hire,  and  all  horses 
had  to  be  branded.  After  passing  over  a  period  of  more  than  a 
hundred  and  twenty  years  we  find  that  in  1776  the  average  size 
of  the  Connecticut  horse  was  thirteen  hands  and  three  inches, 
thus  ranging  below  the  other  New  England  colonies.  At  that 
period  it  is  found  that  the  ratio  of  pacers  and  trotters  was  as 
fifteen  pacers,  or  trotters  and  pacers,  to  four  that  trotted  only. 
The  very  interesting  experience  of  two  English  travelers, 
mounted  on  Connecticut  pacers,  in  1769,  and  their  enthusiasm 
about  their  superlative  qualities,  will  be  found  in  its  place. 

The  colony  of  Rhode  Island  was  planted  in  1636  by  Eoger  Will- 
iams and  his  followers,  and  eleven  years  later  they  obtained  their 
charter.  Their  supply  of  horses  came  wholly  from  the  colony  of 
Massachusetts,  and  in  a  short  time  the  new  plantation  became 
greatly  distinguished  for  the  superiority  and  speed  of  its  pacers. 
From  the  official  report  of  the  colony  for  1690,  we  learn  that 
horses  constituted  their  leading  item  of  exports,  and  that  they 
were  shipping  horses  to  all  the  colonies  of  the  seaboard.  At  that 
early  day  the  fame  of  the  Narragansett  pacer  extended  through 
all  the  English  colonies,  and  probably  also  through  the  French 
plantations  on  the  St.  Lawrence.  All  trade  with  Canada  was 
strictly  prohibited,  but  in  the  then  condition  of  the  borders  how 
could  such  regulation  be  enforced,  if  a  Frenchman,  with  a  bale 
of  peltry,  wanted  to  exchange  it  for  a  Narragansett?  Freed 
from  the  Puritan  restrictions  of  New  England,  of  that  day,  the 
Ehode  Islanders  developed  the  speed  of  their  pacers  by  racing 


14  THE    HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

them,  and  thus  the  best  and  fastest  of  all  New  England  were 
collected  there.  In  1768  the  average  height  of  the  Narragansetts 
was  fourteen  hands  and  one  inch,  which  shows  them  to  have  been 
about  three  and  a  quarter  inches  higher  than  the  Virginia  horses 
of  the  same  period.  They  were  not  all  pacers,  for  out  of  thirty- 
five  there  were  eight  that  did  not  pace,  and  some  others  that 
both  trotted  and  paced.  A  full  account  of  these  famous  pacers 
will  be  found  in  the  chapter  on  the  Colonial  Horse  History  of 
New  England,  and  that  on  The  American  Pacer  and  his  Kelations 
to  the  American  Trotter. 

William  Penn  did  not  visit  his  princely  gift  from  Charles  II. 
until  1683,  and  it  was  then  under  the  government  of  the  Duke  of 
York.  In  giving  a  description  of  things  as  he  found  them  he 
remarks:  "The  horses  are  not  very  handsome,  but  good,"  and 
this  is  all  he  says  of  them.  Knowing  that  Pennsylvania,  in  the 
early  part  of  this  century,  produced  larger  and  heavier  horses 
than  any  other  portion  of  the  country,  it  was  a  great  surprise  to 
me  to  find  the  undoubted  proof  that  a  hundred  years  earlier  she 
had  produced  the  smallest  and  the  lightest  horses  of  any  of  the 
colonies.  In  the  first  half  of  the  last  century  the  average  size  of 
the  horses  of  Eastern  Pennsylvania  was  thirteen  hands  one  and 
a  quarter  inches,  and  they  were  remarkably  uniform  in  size.  This 
was  one-quarter  inch  below  the  average  of  the  Virginians.  Of 
the  twenty-eight  animals  examined  as  to  gait,  twenty-four  of 
them  were  natural  pacers,  three  both  paced  and  trotted,  and  a 
single  one  trotted  only.  Finding  these  two  facts  of  uniformity 
of  size  and  uniformity  of  gait  together,  we  are  prepared  for 
another  fact  that  follows,  viz.,  in  Philadelphia  the  pacers  were 
more  popular  and  fashionable  than  in  any  other  city,  so  far  as  we 
can  learn,  and  they  were  selected  with  great  care  and  bred  for 
their  speed,  and  that  speed  was  highly  tested  on  the  race-course. 
They  were  breeding  for  speed  without  much  regard  to  size,  and 
hence  the  uniformity. 

It  has  not  been  discovered  that  the  colonists  of  New  Jersey 
made  any  direct  importations  of  horses  from  England.  Their 
original  supplies  were  obtained  from  New  York  on  the  one  side 
and  Pennsylvania  on  the  other.  Erom  these  sources,  therefore, 
we  can  form  a  correct  estimate  of  the  size  and  gaits  of  the  Jersey 
horses,  without  going  into  particular  investigation.  The  only 
object,"  then,  in  referring  to  this  colony  is  to  prove  that  before 
1748  all  kinds  of  racing  had  become  so  common  in  the  colony  as 


GENERAL   VIEW   OF   THE   FIELD.  15 

to  be  a  nuisance.  Consequently  the  legislative  authority  passed 
an  act  in  1748  for  the  suppression  of  "Running,  Pacing  and 
Trotting  Races. "  This  was  in  strict  harmony  with  the  well-known 
condition  of  things  in  Philadelphia  and  vicinity  very  early  in 
the  century.  If  there  had  been  no  pacing  races  there  would 
have  been  no  legislation  suppressing  them. 

The  horses  of  the  colony  of  Maryland  would  necessarily  partake 
of  the  characteristics  of  Virginia  and  Pennsylvania,  from  which 
she  probably  received  her  supply.  There  seems  to  be  no  evidence 
of  direct  importation.  This  colony  was  really  the  first,  in  point 
of  time,  to  legislate  for  the  suppression  of  pacing  races.  In  1747, 
one  year  before  New  Jersey,  an  act  was  passed  forbidding  pacing 
races  in  certain  locations  at  certain  times,  and  the  avowed  object 
was  the  protection  of  the  Friends  in  holding  their  yearly  meetings. 
Here,  then,  we  have  historic  evidence  that  the  three  colonies  of 
Rhode  Island,  Pennsylvania,  and  Virginia  had  frequent  pacing 
races,  and  legislative  evidence  that  Maryland  and  New  Jersey 
had  quite  too  many  pacing  races,  early  in  the  last  century.  It 
follows,  then,  that  the  other  colonies  indulged  their  sporting 
fancies  in  pacing  races  also. 

The  colonies  of  North  and  South  Carolina  obtained  their  supply 
of  horses  from  Virginia,  and  they  possessed  the  same  character- 
istics as  the  parent  stock.  The  first  permanent  settlement  in 
North  Carolina  was  in  1653,  but  before  this  it  had  become  the 
refuge  of  Quakers  and  others  fleeing  from  the  proscriptions  that 
prevailed  in  Virginia  against  all  who  did  not  conform  to  the 
English  church.  South  Carolina  received  her  charter  in  1663,  at 
a  time  when  horses  were  beginning  to  run  wild  in  Virginia.  In 
1747  thirty  horses  were  advertised  in  which  the  size  was  given, 
and  the  average  is  within  a  small  fraction  of  thirteen  and  a  half 
hands  high,  and  in  this  number  two  were  given  as  fifteen  hands, 
which  was  a  very  large  horse  for  that  day.  The  gait  is  given  in 
only  twelve  cases — ten  of  which  were  pacers,  one  paced  and  trotted, 
and  one  trotted  only. 

The  chapter  on  the  "Early  Horse  History  of  Canada"  is  very 
brief.  It  was  not  till  the  year  1665  that  the  first  horses  were 
brought  over  from  France,  and  as  they  came  from  ancient  Picardy, 
right  across  the  Channel  from  England,  it  is  reasonable  to  assume 
that  they  partook  of  the  same  characteristics  as  the  English  horses, 
and  that  many  of  them  were  pacers.  Another  theory  of  the 
origin  of  the  Canadian  pacer  is  the  probability  of  clandestine  trad- 


16  THE    HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

ing  with  the  New  Englanders.  Among  the  many  impossible 
stories  about  the  breeding  of  Old  Tippoo,  the  greatest  sire  of 
Canada,  the  truth  seems  to  come  to  the  surface  at  last,  and  there 
can  be  no  reasonable  doubt  that  he  was  got  by  "Scape  Goat." 
However  much  or  little  dependence  can  be  placed  upon  many  of 
the  claims  of  fast  pacing  stallions  coming  from  Canada,  it  must 
be  conceded  that  some  of  these  claims  seem  to  be  well  founded, 
and  that  the  pacing  element  has  been  greatly  strengthened  by 
blood  from  the  other  side  of  the  border. 

The  most  striking  fact  in  the  history  of  the  pacing  habit  of 
action  is  its  great  antiquity.  The  average  Englishman  of  to-day 
and  the  average  American  of  twenty  years  ago  have  been  united 
in  insisting  with  the  greatest  vehemence  that  the  pace  is  not  a 
natural  but  an  acquired  gait,  resulting  from  some  injury  or  mal- 
formation. One  of  the  great  leaders  on  that  side  of  the  discus- 
sion called  it  "structural  incongruity"  arising  from  the  breeding 
of  the  "thoroughbred"  horse  on  the  "slab-sided"  mares  of  the 
West  and  South,  and  thought  the  idea  was  unanswerable,  but 
never  cited  any  instances  to  prove  it.  Now,  the  truth  is,  the 
earliest  unquestioned  evidence  we  have  that  horses  paced  is  that 
furnished  by  the  chisel  of  Phidias  when  he  sculptured  the  horses 
on  the  frieze  of  the  Parthenon  at  Athens,  and  that  is  tAvo 
thousand  three  hundred  and  thirty-three  years  old.  From  the 
period  when  the  sons  of  Japheth  turned  their  attention  to  horse- 
breeding  on  the  fruitful  plains  and  valleys  in  the  regions  of  the 
mountains  of  Ararat  down  to  this  culmination  of  Greek  art,  I 
have  not  been  able  to  find  any  contemporaneous  evidence  of 
the  existence  of  the  lateral  habit  of  action;  but  as  we  know  it 
existed  more  than  two  thousand  years  ago,  we  are  justified 
in  concluding  that  among  the  original  bands  of  horses,  in  their 
original  habitat,  pacers  as  well  as  trotters  abounded.  From  the 
erection  of  the  Parthenon  in  Athens,  the  occupation  of  Britain 
by  the  Romans,  and  through  all  the  centuries  down  to  the  plan- 
tation of  the  colonies  in  this  country,  we  have  mountains  of  indis- 
putable evidence  of  the  antiquity  of  the  pacer.  In  its  place  this 
topic  will  be  quite  fully  discussed. 

The  relation  which  the  pacer  bears  to  the  American  Trotting 
Horse  has  for  twenty-five  years  been  a  topic  of  much  senseless 
discussion.  In  the  historical  sketch  which  served  as  an  introduc- 
tion to  the  first  volume  of  the  "American  Trotting  Register,"  the 
attention  of  the  breeding  public  was  first  called  to  this  question, 


GENERAL  VIEW   OF   THE   FIELD.  17 

in  a  form  that  was  somewhat  tentative,  and  much  less  didactic 
than  my  judgment  suggested,  but  it  served  as  an  introduction  to 
the  study  of  the  question  which  it  foreshadowed.  From  this 
initial  paragraph  grew  the  discussion  that  has  been  going  on  ever 
since,  much  of  which  has  been  the  merest  jargon.  The  essential 
oneness  of  the  trot  and  the  pace  has  been  clearly  demonstrated  by 
thousands  of  experiences.  The  trotting  inheritance  that  pro- 
duces the  fast  trotter  also  produces  the  fast  pacer;  and  the  pacing 
inheritance  that  produces  the  fast  pacer  also  produces  the  fast 
trotter.  The  trotting-bred  John  R.  Gentry,  with  his  pacing 
record  of  a  mile  in  two  minutes  and  one-half  a  second,  is  but  a 
single  instance  of  very  many  of  the  same  character.  The  fastest 
harness  racers  in  the  world  are  the  pacers,  and  it  seems  to  make 
no  difference  whether  the  inheritance  of  speed  comes  from  the 
trotter  or  the  pacer.  The  subject  of  the  pacer  in  his  diversified 
historical  relations  to  the  American  trotter  will  be  found  in  dif- 
ferent portions  of  this  work,  and  all  tending  to  show  the  signifi- 
cant fact  that  he  is  again  rapidly  attaining  the  position  of  honor 
among  the  equine  race  which  he  maintained  for  so  many  centuries 
in  the  far-distant  past. 

Early  in  this  century  the  American  Saddle  Horse,  the  real 
saddle  horse  of  all  time,  past  and  present,  began  to  vanish  from 
sight.  Improved  roads  and  wheeled  vehicles  superseded  him,  in 
great  measure,  long  before  the  days  of  railroads.  For  business 
and  travel  he  was  the  sole  dependence  of  our  forefathers  for  two 
hundred  years,  and  in  point  of  health  it  is  a  great  misfortune 
that  he  has  gone  so  completely  out  of  use.  The  horse  that  cannot 
take  the  "saddle  gaits"  and  carry  his  rider  without  discomfort  or 
fatigue  is  not  a  saddle  horse.  Springing  up  and  down  at  every 
revolution  of  the  horse  is  not  riding  for  pleasure,  but  to  avoid 
punishment  and  a  torpid  liver.  In  the  chapter  devoted  to  his 
description,  origin,  and  breeding,  it  will  be  clearly  shown  that  he 
is  indebted  to  his  pacing  ancestry  of  the  past  centuries  for  his 
saddle  gaits.  As  the  mere  matter  of  great  speed  cuts  no  figure  in 
the  qualifications  of  a  saddle  horse  there  is  a  wide  field  here  for 
the  production  of  style  and  beauty  in  the  breeder's  art.  The  aims 
of  a  goodly  number  of  intelligent  breeders  are  now  moving  in  this 
direction,  and  with  the  foundations  so  well  laid  as  they  now  are, 
we  can  look  forward  to  a  grand  superstructure.  As  the  breeder 
of  speed  at  the  trot  goes  to  the  horse  that  can  do  it  himself,  and 
as  the  breeder  of  speed  at  the  gallop  goes  to  the  horse  that  can 


IB  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

beat  all  the  others,  so  the  breeder  of  the  saddler  will  go  to  the 
handsomest  and  best  of  all  his  tribe,  and  when  we  reach  the  horse 
that  is  perfect  in  symmetry,  style,  quality,  and  disposition,  he  will 
be  a  saddle  horse  and  no  questions  will  be  asked  about  what  par- 
ticular combinations  of  blood  he  may  possess.  He  will  be  strictly 
eclectic,  with  the  one  exception  of  the  inheritance  of  gait,  and  he 
will  be  the  result  of  wise  choosing  in  his  size  and  structure,  and 
of  skillful  handling  in  his  disposition  and  manners. 

The  Wild  Horse  of  the  plains  and  pampas  of  .North  and  South 
America  was  at  one  time  an  object  of  great  interest  and  curiosity 
with  all  our  people.  No  schoolboy  of  sixty  or  seventy  years  ago 
knew  any  lesson  in  his  geography  so  well  as  the  one  which  pic- 
tured and  described  the  millions  of  wild  horses  that  roamed  over 
the  Western  plains.  In  the  field  of  imagination  and  exaggerated 
fiction  he  was  a  fairly  good  second  to  the  Arabian — both  arrant 
humbugs,  at  least  so  far  as  their  merits  have  been  tested.  In  the 
past,  the  question  has  sometimes  been  asked,  tentatively, 
whether  the  horse  may  not  have  been  indigenous  on  this  conti- 
nent? The  paleontologists  have  undertaken  to  answer  this  ques- 
tion in  the  affirmative  and  have  produced  the  bones  of  what  they 
call  the  horse  to  prove  it.  This  ' 'horse' '  is  scant  fifteen  inches 
high  and  he  has  three,  four  or  five  toes  on  each  foot.  These  toes 
resemble  "claws"  more  than  anything  else.  They  tell  us  these 
little  animals  flourished  over  two  millions  of  years  before  man  was 
placed  on  the  earth,  and  that  they  are  now  found  imbedded  in 
the  solid  rock,  say  two  hundred  feet  below  the  general  surface. 
The  outline  drawing  of  horses  on  works  supposed  to  have  been 
erected  by  a  prehistoric  and  lost  race,  and  also  the  linguistic  ques- 
tion as  to  whether  any  of  the  oldest  Indian  tribes  had  any  word 
representing  the .  horse,  will  be  fully  considered,  with  that  pre- 
sented by  the  paleontologists,  in  the  chapter  devoted  to  the  Wild 
Horse.  Too  much  prominence  has  been  given  to  the  horses  of 
Cortez  in  his  conquest  of  Mexico,  as  the  progenitors  of  the  Amer- 
ican wild  horse.  He  had  very-few  horses  in  his  command,  and  it 
is  very  doubtful  whether  any  of  them  escaped  the  slaughter  of 
battle  and  found  a  home  in  the  wilderness.  The  horses  in  the 
army  of  the  unfortunate  Ferdinand  De  Soto,  that  were  aban- 
doned on  the  confines  of  Texas,  after  his  death,  became  the  pro- 
genitors of  all  the  wild  horses  of  North  America. 

The  remarkable  pre-eminence  to  which  Messenger  attained  as 
the  founder  of  a  great  race  of  trotters,  in  his  own  right  and  by 


GENERAL  VIEW   OF   THE   FIELD.  19* 

his  own  power,  and  more  especially  as  lie  was  the  only  English- 
imported  running  horse  that  ever  showed  any  tendency  whatever 
in  that  direction,  the  study  of  Messenger's  lineage  becomes  a. 
question  of  very  great  interest  and  value  to  all  students  of  trot- 
ting history.  His  sire,  Mambrino,  was  a  great  race  horse,  and 
was  distinguished  above  all  others  of  his  generation,  or  indeed  of 
any  other  generation,  before  or  since,  as  the  progenitor  of  a  tribe 
of  coach  horses  of  great  excellence  and  value.  In  addition 
to  this,  the  evidence  *seems  to  be  conclusive  that  he  had  a  natural 
and  undeveloped  trotting  step  that  far  surpassed  that  of  all  other 
running  horses  of  his  day.  His  sire,  Engineer,  was  notoriously 
short  on  the  side  of  his  dam,  and  his  grandsire,  Sampson,  was  a 
half-breed  of  great  size  and  bone,  and  ran  some  winning  races,  in 
the  best  of  company,  for  that  day. 

The  history  of  Messenger  himself  is  still  clouded  in  mystery, 
and  the  blood  he  inherited  from  his  dam  remains  hopelessly  un- 
known. The  identity  of  his  importer  and  owner  has  never  been 
established,  which  of  itself  throws  a  suspicion  upon  the  pedigree 
that  is  said  to  have  come  with  him.  He  ran  several  races  at 
Newmarket,  England,  and  proved  himself  a  second  or  third-rate 
race  horse.  The  racing  records  there  show  that  he  was  by 
Mambrino,  and  that  is  all  that  is  known  about  his  inheritance. 
He  left  a  few  tolerably  good  race  horses,  for  their  time,  but  he 
filled  the  country  with  the  best  road  and  driving  horses  that  the 
horsemen  of  this  country  had  ever  known.  A  chapter  each  to 
Messenger's  ancestors  and  to  himself  will  be  found  in  their  proper 
places  in  this  volume.  The  twenty  years  of  Messenger's  life  and 
service  in  this  country  fell  in  a  period  of  indifference  to  all  kinds 
of  racing  except  running.  The  English  race  horse  was  then  the 
popular  idol,  and  it  is  not  known  that  any  of  his  sons  or  daugh- 
ters were  ever  trained  to  trot.  Neither  can  it  now  be  certainly 
determined  that  any  of  them  were  disposed  to  pace,  but  if  we 
may  judge  of  the  habits  of  action  of  his  immediate  progeny  by 
what  we  know  of  succeeding  generations,  we  can  hardly  doubt 
that  there  were  pacers  among  them.  As  the  custom  then  was, 
and  as  it  so  remained  for  at  least  half  a  century  later,  all  pacers 
were  hidden  away  from  public  sight,  as  they  were  supposed  to 
furnish  evidence  of  ignoble  breeding. 

The  chapter  on  "The  Sons  of  Messenger"  will  be  long,  but  it 
will  be  of  exceeding  interest.  They  constitute  the  connecting 
link  that  brings  together  the  peculiar  trotting  instincts  of  tlie 


20  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

sire  and  develops  them  in  their  own  progeny.  Several  of  them 
were  not  only  trained  to  run,  bat  did  run  successfully.  It  is  not 
known  that  any  of  his  sons  was  ever  trained  to  trot,  but  it  is 
known  from  contemporaneous  evidence  that  several  of  them  were 
fast  natural  trotters,  notably  Bishop's  Hambletonian,  Bush  Mes- 
senger, Winthrop  Messenger,  Mambrino,  etc.,  all  of  which  will 
be  considered  in  their  proper  place.  When  we  reach  the  second 
remove  from  Messenger  we  begin  to  enter  into  the  full  fruition 
of  all  the  promises,  and  in  considering  such 'animals  as  Abdallah, 
Almack,  Mambrino  Paymaster,  Harris'  Hambletonian,  etc.,  we 
begin  to  feel  that  we  are  well  within  the  trotting  latitudes,  for 
this  remove  began  to  found  families  and  tribes  that  attracted  the 
attention  of  all  intelligent  breeders. 

In  the  next  remove  from  Messenger  we  strike  the  most  famous 
of  all  trotting  progenitors  in  Rysdyk's  Hambletonian.  At  one 
time  there  was  an  active  and  determined  difference  of  opinion 
among  breeders  as  to  which  of  three  horses,  Hambletonian,  Ethan 
Allen,  or  Mambrino  Chief,  would  in  the  end  prove  to  be  the  most 
successful  sire.  This  controversy  may  not  be  remembered  by  the 
younger  of  the  present  generation  of  horsemen,  but  it  was  bitter 
and  uncompromising,  and  it  presents  a  lesson  so  important  that  it 
may  be  here  referred  to.  The  adherents  of  Ethan  Allen  argued 
that  as  he  was  handsomer,  that  his  gait  was  the  very  perfection  of 
trotting^action,  and  that  he  was  incomparably  faster  than  either 
of  the  other  two,  he  must  of  necessity  prove  the  most  success- 
ful in  begetting  trotters.  The  adherents  of  Mambrino  Chief 
used  the  same  argument,  with  the  exception  of  beauty  and  style, 
and  dwelt  strongly  on  the  fact  that  he  was  a  faster  horse  than 
Hambletonian,  and  would  consequently  get  faster  offspring. 
Both  these  arguments  were  good,  so  far  as  they  went,  but  they 
lacked  completeness  and  hence  were  not  sound.  Neither  Ethan 
Allen  nor  Mambrino  Chief  had  a  dam,  and  so  far  as  we  know  the 
inheritance  of  both  was  restricted  to  the  male  side  of  the  house. 
Development  of  speed  is  a  valuable  and  real  qualification  in  any 
sire,  but  all  experience  goes  to  show  that  it  is  only  a  help  to  an 
inheritance.  Hambletonian  was  not  much  developed,  but  it  is 
conceded  on  all  hands  that  he  could  show  a  2:40  gait  at  any  time 
and  that  his  action  was  very  perfect.  He  was  got  by  a  grandson 
of  Messenger,  whose  dam,  Amazonia,  was  one  of  the  fastestmares 
of  her  generation,  whatever  her  blood  may  have  been.  Abdallah 
got  more  and  faster  trotters  than  any  other  grandson  of  Messenger, 


GENERAL    VIEW    OF   THE    FIELD.  21 

and  his  daughters  were  very  famous  as  the  producers  of  trotters. 
Hambletonian's  dam,  the  Kent  Mare,  was  by  imported  Bell- 
founder,  a  horse  that  got  no  trotters  practically,  but  this  mare 
was  the  fastest  four-year-old  of  her  time,  and  that  because  she  was 
out  of  a  very  fast  mare,  One  Eye,  that  was  a  double  granddaugh- 
ter of  Messenger.  That  is,  One  Eye  was  by  Hambletonian,  the 
son  of  Messenger,  and  out  of  Silvertail,  a  daughter  of  Messenger. 
This  double  Messenger  mare  was  unknown  to  the  trotting  turf, 
but  she  was  well  known  throughout  Orange  County  as  a  remark- 
ably fast  trotter.  Hence  Hambletouian  not  only  possessed  more 
Messenger  blood  than  any  horse  of  his  generation,  but  that  blood 
came  to  him  through  developed  trotters,  and  he  had  a  right  to 
surpass  all  competitors,  especially  the  two  that  were,  at  one  time, 
the  most  prominent. 

Several  of  the  sons  of  Hambletonian,  as  shown  by  the  tabular 
statistics  which  will  be  introduced,  became  greater  than  their 
sire,  not  only  in  getting  trotters  from  their  own  loins,  but  in 
transmitting  the  trotting  instinct  to  their  descendants.  The 
growth  and  spread  of  this  family  is  far  and  away  beyond  any  prece- 
dent that  can  be  cited  in  any  age  or  country,  and  is  simply  mar- 
velous. It  is  said  that  fully  ninety  per  cent,  of  the  fast  trotters 
now  on  the  turf  have  more«or  less  of  the  blood  of  Hambletonian 
in  their  veins,  and  I  think  it  is  a  safe  conclusion  to  say  that 
no  intelligent  breeder  in  all  the  country  is  trying  to  produce 
trotters  without  it.  All  the  other  tribes  are  dropping  out  of 
sight,  and  at  the  present  ratio  of  rise  and  fall  it  will  be  but  a  few 
years  till  every  trotter  on  the  turf  will  be  credited  in  some 
degree  to  the  one  really  great  progenitor,  Hambletonian.  The 
other  tribes  will  not  be  blotted  out  nor  will  their  merits  be  lost, 
but  absorbed  into  the  mightier  tribe. 

Such  families  as  the  Bashaws,  the  Clays,  the  Black  Hawks,  the 
Mambrino  Chiefs,  the  Pilots,  the  American  Stars,  the  Blue  Bulls, 
etc.,  will  be  fully  considered  through  several  chapters,  according 
to  their  strength  and  merit.  As  these  families  have  not  been 
able  to  hold  their  own  in  the  rush  to  the  front,  and  as  they  seem 
to  be  falling  further  to  the  rear  in  the  number  and  quality  of 
their  performers  each  succeeding  year,  we  may  as  well  begin  to 
designate  them  as  "the  minor  families."  Their  inheritance  was 
feeble  and  unsatisfactory,  and  more  or  less  sporadic,  and  we  never 
had  any  right  to  expect  a  brilliant  and  permanent  success  from 
such  beginnings. 


22  THE    HORSE    OP    AMERICA. 

As  the  investigation  of  disputed,,  spurious  and  fraudulent  pedi- 
grees was  a  prime  necessity  in  order  to  reach  safe  and  honest 
grounds  upon  which  to  build  up  a  breed  of  trotters,  much  of  my 
time  through  all  my  editorial  life  was  devoted  to  this  kind  of 
investigation.  From  the  first  page  of  the  first  volume  of  the 
"Register"  I  was  deeply  impressed  with  the  importance  of  having 
all  pedigrees  absolutely  correct,  and  this  impression  grew  into  a 
vital  conviction  that  without  this  a  breed  of  trotters  never  could 
be  established.  I  soon  found  that  I  had  accepted  from  some 
breeders  of  the  very  highest  respectability  a  goodly  number  of 
pedigrees  that  were  thoroughly  rotten  in  their  extensions.  This 
taught  me  that  I  must  study  the  moral  fiber  of  breeders  critically, 
as  well  as  their  pedigrees,  and  that  from  the  highest  to  the 
lowest.  Some  men  are  honest  from  principle  and  because  it  is 
right  to  be  honest,  while  others  are  honest  because  "honesty  is 
the  best  policy."  Some  men  are  dishonest  because  of  ignorance, 
others  because  they  were  born  cheats,  but  the  most  dangerous  of 
all  rogues  is  the  man  who  will  utter  a  false  pedigree  and  then 
prove  it  by  trained  witnesses  who,  for  half  a  dollar,  can  remember 
whatever  is  necessary  and  forget  whatever  might  be  against  their 
employer's  interest.  By  this  kind  of  evidence  a  man  can  prove 
anything.  Not  very  long  ago  a  man  proved  that  a  certain  mare 
came  out  of  a  certain  other  mare,  and  when  that  was  shown  to  be 
impossible  he  turned  round  and  proved  (?)  that  she  was  out  of 
another  mare,  and  there  was  just  as  much  truth  in  the  one  as  the 
other,  and  not  a  single  word  of  truth  in  either.  So  long  as  there 
are  men  in  the  world  there  will  be  rogues  among  them,  but  the 
intelligence  of  the  public  in  breeding  matters  has  so  greatly  ad- 
vanced that  many  an  honest  man  would  begin  to  doubt  his  own 
sanity  if  he  were  even  to  think  of  breeding  in  lines  that  he  was 
once  ready  to  fight  for  as  the  only  right  and  successful  way  to 
breed.  The  brainless  advocacy  of  "more  running  blood  in  the 
trotter,"  was  substantially  the  basis  of  the  whole  brood  of  dis- 
honest pedigrees,  against  which  it  became  my  duty  to  wage  war; 
but  to-day  no  intelligent  man  in  all  the  land  can  be  found  to  ad- 
vocate any  such  balderdash  unless  it  be  in  the  foolish  support  of 
thoughtless  opinions  previously  expressed. 

The  subject  of  "How  the  Trotting  Horse  is  Bred,"  is  a  most 
interesting  one  because  it  is  entirely  new  in  animal  economy  and 
is  distinctively  American.  The  initial  thought  that  opened  the 
-door  to  the  practical  and  scientific  consideration  of  the  subject 


GENEKAL   VIEW    OF   THE   FIELD.  '23 

was  the  happy  conception,  in  the  spring  of  1872,  of  the  little 
phrase,  "Trotting  Instinct."  Following  this  with  the  definition 
of  the  word  "instinct"  as  being  "the  sum  of  inherited  habits," 
the  term  expressed  in  two  words  and  the  definition  of  it  in  five 
words,  put  the  whole  subject  in  a  form  that  was  easily  compre- 
hensible and  flashe'd  upon  the  mind  as  thoroughly  practical. 
This  little  phrase,  with  its  definition,  when  once  comprehended, 
is  a  very  complete  epitome  of  all  that  has  been  taught  and  all 
that  has  been  learned  of  the  art  of  breeding  the  trotter.  It  not 
only  embraces,  but  requires,  the  trotting  inheritance  as  the  only 
starting  point,  which  must  be  strengthened  and  the  instinct  in- 
tensified by  the  development  of  the  speed  of  succeeding  genera- 
tions. It  stood  some  years  at  the  parting  of  the  ways  between 
intelligence  and  ignorance,  between  enlightened  judgment  and 
stupid  prejudice,  between  honesty  and  dishonesty,  but  now  it  is 
accepted,  in  practice,  as  the  universal  law  from  one  end  of  the 
land  to  the  other.  Thus,  we  have  not  only  added  millions  to  the 
wealth  of  the  country,  but  without  any  outside  assistance  or  in- 
struction we  have  produced  a  horse  that  by  way  of  pre-eminence, 
throughout  the  world,  is  justly  entitled  to  be  designated,  "The 
Horse  of  America." 


CHAPTER  II. 

ORIGINAL   HABITAT   OF   THE   HORSE. 

No  indications  that  the  horse  was  originally  wild — The  steppes  of  High  Asia 
and  Arabia  not  tenable  as  his  original  home — Color  not  sufficient  evidence — 
Impossibility  of  horses  existing  in  Arabia  in  a  wild  state — No  horses  in 
Arabia  until  356  A.D. — Large  forces  of  Armenian,  Median,  and  Cappadocian 
cavalry  employed  more  than  one  thousand  seven  hundred  years  B.C. — A 
breed  of  white  race  horses — Special  adaptability  of  the  Armenian  country 
to  the  horse — Armenia  a  horse-exporting  country  before  the  Prophet 
Ezekiel — Devotion  of  the  Armenian  people  to  agricultural  and  pastoral 
pursuits  through  a  period  of  four  thousand  years — All  the  evidences  point 
to  ancient  Armenia  as  the  center  from  which  the  horse  was  distributed. 

IN"  undertaking  to  consider  and  determine  what  particular  por- 
tion of  the  earth  was  the  original  habitat  of  the  horse,  we  must 
not  forget  that  we  are  in  a  field  that  antedates  all  history,  both 
sacred  and  profane.  When  we  have  gone  back  to  the  very  first 
dawnings  of  historical  records  we  are  still  far  short  of  the  period 
in  which  initial  light  can  be  reached.  In  profane  history,  with 
more  or  less  safety,  we  can  get  back  to  a  point  about  seventeen 
hundred  years  before  the  Christian  era;  and  in  sacred  history 
about  two  hundred  years  less.  At  both  of  these  dates  the  horses 
referred  to  were  not  in  a  feral  state,  but  were  the  companions 
and  servants  of  man. 

There  have  been  two  separate  theories  advanced  which  demand 
some  attention,  because  of  the  eminence  and  learning  of  the  men 
who  have  advanced  them.  The  first  is  that  the  original  habitat 
of  the  horse  was  on  the  steppes  of  High  Asia,  east  and  north  of 
the  Caspian  and  the  Black  Sea.  The  only  argument  I  have  ever 
seen  advanced  in  support  of  this  theory  is  based  upon  the  great 
number  of  wild  horses  that  are  found  in  that  part  of  the  world, 
and  that  so  many  of  them  are  of  a  dun  color.  From  the  fre- 
quency of  the  recurrence  of  the  dun  color  another  theory  has 
sprung  up  to  the  effect  that  the  original  color  of  the  horse  was; 


ORIGINAL   HABITAT   OF   THE    HORSE.  25 

dun,  and  hence  it  is  argued  that  when  the  dun  color  appears  in 
our  own  day  it  must  be  taken  as  evidence  that  the  original  color 
of  the  horse  was  dun.  This  reasoning  is  very  far  from  being 
conclusive,  for  there  are  dun  horses  and  dun  tribes  in  all  breeds, 
just  as  there  are  greys,  and  the  color  is  just  as  liable  to  be  trans- 
mitted as  any  other  color.  In  the  last  century  there  were  many 
dun  horses  in  England,  and  at  least  one  of  that  color  was  adver- 
tised very  widely  as  "the  Dun  Arabian,"  probably  a  foreign 
horse,  but  it  is  hardly  possible  that  he  was  an  Arabian.  It  was  then 
the  custom  of  the  country  to  call  all  foreign  horses  "Arabians," 
no  difference  from  what  part  of  the  world  they  came.  It  has 
been  stated  on  what  seemed  to  be  good  authority  that  a  dun 
horse  once  won  the  Derby,  but  whether  the  color  may  result  from 
line  breeding  or  from  atavistic  tendencies,  the  argument  advanced 
does  not  seem  to  have  any  weight  in  it  for  the  purpose  intended. 

Another  argument  in  favor  of  the  wild  and  unknown  regions 
east  and  north  of  the  Caspian  as  the  habitat  of  the  horse  has 
been  urged  with  much  more  power  and  effect.  It  has  been  ac- 
cepted and  reiterated  by  so  many  learned  men.  one  after  another, 
that  I  doubted  the  wisdom  of  attempting  to  overthrow  it,  until  I 
found  the  spot  in  which  it  was  fatally  weak.  This  view  of  the 
question  seems  to  rest  upon  the  fact  that  the  successive  hosts  of 
Barbarians  that  overran  Europe  in  the  early  centuries  of  the 
Christian  era  brought  their  horses,  as  well  as  their  flocks  and 
herds,  with  them,  and  it  is  assumed  that  these  horses  were  the 
first  brought  into  Europe.  This  involves  a  total  misconception 
of  dates;  not  of  a  few  years  merely,  but  of  many  centuries.  All 
of  Europe,  including  Britain,  and  all  of  Northern  Africa,  were 
abundantly  supplied  with  horses,  probably  a  thousand  years 
before  the  first  destructive  wave  of  Barbarians  touched  Europe. 
Linguistic  and  ethnological  facts  clearly  prove  that  those  people 
came  from  Asia,  and  possibly  from  a  part  of  Asia  where  there 
were  horses  running  wild,  but  that  does  not  prove  that  they  came 
from  the  original  habitat  of  the  horse.  With  no  dates,  either 
definite  or  approximate,  to  support  this  theory,  and  with  no 
specific  portion  of  the  earth  fixed  upon  as  the  general  locality 
from  which  they  came,  it  resolves  itself  into  a  mere  speculation 
with  nothing  to  support  it,  except  the  fact  that  different  writers 
have  been  copying  it  from  one  another,  without  throwing  any 
additional  light  upon  it,  for  a  number  of  generations. 

The  most  remarkable  and  at  the  same  time  the  most  untenable 


26  THE    HOESE    OF    AMEEICA. 

of  all  the  claims  that  have  been  urged  about  the  horse  is  that  he 
was  indigenous  in  Arabia.  We  can  tolerate  any  number  of  foolish 
claims  set  up  to  show  that  the  Arabian  horse  is  superior  to  all 
others,  for  such  assertions  can  be  tested  and  disproved,  as  they 
have  been  a  thousand  times,  but  the  claim  that  Arabia  was  the 
original  habitat  of  the  horse  is  so  utterly  preposterous,  and  yet  so 
widely  advocated  by  writers  and  others  who  know  nothing  about 
it,  that  we  must  consider  it  with  some  brief  deliberation.  When 
the  maimed  and  crippled  horses  of  De  Soto  were  turned  loose  and 
abandoned  on  the  plains  of  Texas,  they  had  all  around  them  the 
means  of  an  abundant  and  healthy  subsistence,  and  they  multi- 
plied and  grew  into  an  innumerable  host  that  made  the  earth 
tremble  when  they  moved  in  great  masses.  Under  the  same 
favorable  conditions  of  water  and  pasture,  the  same  results  fol- 
lowed on  the  pampas  of  South  America.  Upon  the  early  settle- 
ment of  Virginia,  as  well  probably  as  in  some  of  the  other 
colonies,  and  within  two  hundred  years,  many  of  the  horses  of 
the  colonists  strayed  away,  became  wild  and  remained  so,  prop- 
agating and  increasing  for  generations,  and  until  the  growing 
numbers  of  their  former  masters  captured  or  exterminated  them. 
The  varied  herbage  of  the  forest  and  its  grassy  swales,  and 
streams  of  pure  water  everywhere,  made  Virginia  a  paradise  for 
the  horse  in  his  feral  state. 

Buffon,  the  French  naturalist  of  a  hundred  and  fifty  years  ago, 
notices  the  theory  of  the  wild  horses  of  Arabia,  but  he  is  careful 
not  to  commit  himself  nor  indorse  it  in  any  form.  In  Vol.  I.,  p. 
237,  he  says:  "According  to  Mannol,  the  Arabian  horses  are  de- 
scended from  the  wild  horses  in  the  deserts  of  Arabia,  of  which, 
in  ancient  times,  large  studs  were  formed/'  etc.  In  going  fur- 
ther, to  find  where  Mannol  got  his  information,  it  appears  that 
somebody,  with  an  unpronounceable  name  that  I  have  forgotten, 
told  him  so.  Major  Upton,  a  very  intelligent  but  very  credulous 
modern  writer  on  what  he  saw  and  learned  in  the  desert,  says  he 
never  heard  of  this  story  of  wild  horses  in  Arabia,  and  pro- 
nounces it  a  "fallacy."  When  we  consider  that  Arabia  never  was 
conquered  and  the  reason  why,  although  Home,  at  the  very  culmi- 
nation of  her  power,  followed  by  Assyria  and  Egypt,  all  failed  of 
their  purpose  without  meeting  an  enemy  in  battle,  we  must  ac- 
cept the  fact  that  nature  had  interposed  a  barrier  that  military 
power  could  not  surmount.  The  barrenness  and  aridity  of  the 
desert  has  always  protected  the  Arabs  against  the  most  power- 


ORIGINAL   HABITAT   OF   THE   HOUSE.  27' 

f ul  armies  of  the  mightiest  nations.  Now,  to  maintain  that  wild 
horses  could  not  only  live,  but  flourish  and  increase,  in  a  country 
where  there  was  not  enough  edible  herbage  on  a  thousand  acres 
to  keep  a  grasshopper  alive,  and  not  a  running  stream  of  water 
within  five  hundred  miles,  requires  a  measure  of  mental  sterility 
that  can  be  found  nowhere  but  among  a  few  of  the  writers  on 
the  Arabian  horse.  Of  all  the  curiosities  in  which  the  literature  of 
the  Arabian  horse  abounds  and  in  the  multitudinous  efforts  to  give 
him  the  primacy  among  horses,  there  seems  to  be  nothing  quite 
so  absurd  as  this  story  about  his  being  indigenous  to  the  desert. 
Animals  in  a  wild  state  are  never  found  except  in  countries  and 
districts  where  the  conditions  surrounding  provide  them  with 
food  and  water.  How  long  would  a  band  of  strong,  healthy 
horses  live  if  turned  loose  to  seek  their  own  subsistence  in  the 
desert  of  Arabia?  Of  all  the  countries  on  the  face  of  the  globe 
there  is  no  one  where  the  horse  is  so  completely  dependent  upon 
the  care  and  support  of  his  master  as  Arabia. 

Fortunately,  we  are  not  left  for  data  to  unwritten  traditions 
two  thousand  years  old,  nor  to  the  fervid  imaginations  of  a  race 
of  cutthroats  and  thieves  of  the  very  lowest  order  of  civilization, 
but  we  can  turn,  with  full  confidence,  to  authentic  contempora- 
neous history,  from  which  we  can  settle  this  question,  at  once 
and  for  all  time.  Strabo,  the  great  Greek  geographer  and  philos- 
opher, flourished  in  the  reign  of  Augustus,  at  the  very  beginning 
of  the  Christian  era.  He  describes  Arabia  just  as  we  know  it 
to-day,  for  all  countries  have  changed  in  their  boundaries  and 
government  except  Arabia.  He  describes  the  people  as  chiefly 
nomadic,  and  as  breeders  of  camels.  The  most  remarkable  thing 
in  this  description  is  the  fact,  found  in  his  great  work,  Vol.  III.,  p. 
190,  that  they  had  no  horses  at  that  time.  The  exact  language 
used  in  this  statement  will  be  found  in  the  next  chapter  of  this 
work.  The  question  now  arises,  If  there  were  no  horses  in  Arabia 
at  the  beginning  of  the  Christian  era,  when  and  how  did  they 
become  possessed  of  them?  Fortunately,  again,  written  history 
supplies  the  answer  to  this  question.  In  my  next  chapter  will  be 
found,  quoted  at  some  length,  the  circumstances  bearing  on  this 
question.  In  brief,  the  facts  are  as  follows:  Philostorgius,  a  dis- 
tinguished Greek  theologian,  wrote  an  ecclesiastical  history  in  the 
fifth  century  which  .is  no  longer  extant.  Photius,  at  one  time 
Patriarch  of  Constantinople,  in  the  ninth  century  wrote  an 
epitome  of  the  work  by  Philostorgius  and  to  this  epitome  we  are 


28  THE    HOKSE    OF   AMERICA. 

indebted  for  the  facts  we  here  relate.  Constantius,  at  the  time  of 
which  Philostorgius  wrote,  was  on  the  throne  of  the  Eastern 
empire,  and  was  exceedingly  zealous  in  spreading  and  strengthen- 
ing the  Christian  religion.  He  learned  that  the  prince  of  Arabia 
Felix  (that  part  of  Arabia  which  we  will  designate  by  its  modern 
name  Yemen)  was  strongly  disposed  to  come  out  with  his  people 
and  embrace  Christianity.  Constantius  thereupon  determined 
to  encourage  both  prince  and  people  in  the  movement  they  were 
contemplating,  and  he  sent  them  a  grand  embassy  with  many 
valuable  presents,  the  most  noted  of  which  were  two  hundred 
"well-bred  Cappadocian  horses."  The  embassy  was  completely 
successful,  and  Theopholis,  who  had  been  made  a  bishop  and 
placed  at  the  head  of  it,  remained  there  several  years.  This  was 
in  the  year  356  of  the  Christian  era,  and  is  the  first  intimation  we 
have  in  all  history  of  horses  in  Arabia.  These  are  the  facts,  so 
far  as  any  facts  are  known,  upon  the  consideration  of  which  I  am 
not  able  to  assent  to  the  claim  that  either  High  Asia  or  Arabia 
was  the  original  habitat  of  the  horse. 

I  have  been  surprised  at  the  number  of  coincidences  that  seem 
to  point  to  ancient  Armenia  as  the  first  habitation  of  the  horse. 
'This  country  at  one  time  was  a  very  powerful  kingdom,  extending 
from  the  mountains  of  Caucasus  on  the  north  to  Media  or  Assyria 
on  the  south,  and  from  the  Caspian  Sea  on  the  east  to  the 
Euphrates  on  the  west,  and  at  one  time  even  to  the  Mediter- 
ranean. It  was  intersected  by  several  ranges  of  mountains  and 
not  only  gave  rise  to  the  Euphrates  and  the  Tigris,  but  to  a  num- 
ber of  smaller  rivers.  It  was  well  watered  everywhere,  and  pro- 
duced in  great  abundance  all  varieties  of  herbage,  cereals,  and 
fruits.  It  was  originally  called  Ararat  by  the  Hebrews,  probably 
after  a  range  of  mountains  about  central  to  the  territory  em- 
braced, and  because  Noah's  Ark  rested  somewhere  "on  the 
mountains  of  Ararat."  It  is  also  called  Togarmah  in  Scripture, 
after  Torgom,  son  of  Gomer,  who  was  the  son  of  Japheth,  the 
son  of  Noah.  Japheth  seems  to  have  been  the  oldest  son  of 
Noah,  and  he  chose  this  fruitful  region  as  the  future  home  of  his 
descendants.  The  Kev.  Michael  Chamich,  a  native  Armenian, 
went  back  into  the  old  Armenian  records,  translated  the  language 
as  originally  used,  and  wrote  a  history  of  the  country  from  its 
first  settlement;  and  this  history  has  been  Englished  by  Johannes 
Adval,  another  native  Armenian,  and  published  in  Calcutta  in 
1827.  This  work  seems  to  be  worthy  of  credence,  and  it  clearly 


ORIGINAL   HABITAT   OF   THE   HORSE.  29s 

establishes  the  lineal  descent  of  the  governing  family  back  to 
Japheth,  the  son  of  Noah.  The  order  of  succession  as  the  head 
of  the  tribe  continues  through  several  generations  unbroken,  from 
father  to  son.  Gomer,  the  son  of  Japheth,  was  succeeded  by  his 
s«n  Togarmah,  then  followed  Haicus,  Armenac,  Aramais, 
Amassia,  Gelam,  Harma,  Aram,  Arah,  who  was  slain  in  battle, 
his  son  Cardus  (at  twelve  years  old),  Anushaven,  who  died  with- 
out issue  and  was  succeeded  by  Paret,  who  reigned  fifty  years 
and  during  his  reign  the  patriarch  Joseph  died  in  Egypt,  B.C. 
1635.  These  princes  all  had  long  reigns.  Haicus  was  the 
first  of  the  line  to  assume  the  title  of  king,  and  he  was  greatly 
distinguished  for  extending  the  boundaries  of  his  kingdom. 
Gelam  extended  his  borders  to  the  Caspian.  Aram  was  fifty- 
eight  years  on  the  throne,  during  which  time  he  had  a  war  with 
the  Medes,  and  also  with  the  Cappadocians,  in  both  of  which  he 
had  a  large  force  of  cavalry  in  the  field.  This  was  about  seven- 
teen hundred  years  before  the  Christian  era,  and  is  the  first  men- 
tion of  cavalry  that  I  have  found  in  history,  either  sacred  or  pro- 
fane. In  both  these  wars  his  cavalry  was  met  by  the  cavalry  of 
the  enemy,  equal  to  or  greater  than  his  in  numbers.  How  long 
before  this  troops  may  have  been  mounted  on  horses  it  is  impos- 
sible to  say,  but  from  the  numbers  so  used  at  that  period  of  the 
world  by  the  neighboring  nations  and  tribes,  as  the  Medes,  the 
Cappadocians,  etc.,  it  is  fair  to  conclude  that  the  horse  had  then 
been  an  important  factor  in  all  military  movements  for  many 
generations.  When  we  consider  two  opposing  armies,  each  pro- 
vided with  divisions  of  five  thousand  cavalry,  the  period  being 
about  B.C.  1700,  with  no  dates  beyond  that  are  known  as  relating 
to  the  horse,  we  are  shut  up  to  our  own  reasoning  as  to  the  num- 
ber of  centuries  that  may  have  been  required  to  produce  these 
great  numbers.  It  must  have  been  at  least  one  century,  or  it  may 
have  been  three  or  four,  and  this  would  carry  us  back  to  the  head 
of  the  house  of  Japheth. 

If  we  accept  Egyptian  chronology,  which  still  lacks  much  of 
being  reliable,  one  of  the  Pharaohs,  named  Thutmosis  I.,  invaded 
Syria,  passing  up  through  Palestine  till  he  reached  the  latitude  of 
Aleppo,  and  then  turned  eastward  and  crossed  the  Euphrates. 
His  campaign  was  successful;  he  fought  many  battles  and  returned 
laden  with  spoils,  especially  horses  and  chariots  of  war.  This  was 
before  the  Israelites  reached  the  promised  land,  and  before 
Joshua's  battle  with  the  *  'Northern  kings/'  in  which  they  had 


30  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

"horsemen  and  chariots  very  many/'  and  which  is  the  earliest 
Scriptural  instance  in  which  horses  were  employed  in  battle. 

The  territory  embracing  the  ancient  countries  of  Eastern  Asia 
Minor,  bounded  on  the  north  by  the  Black  Sea  and  the  Caucas- 
ian mountains,  on  the  south  by  the  thirty-seventh  degree  of 
north  latitude,  and  extending  to  the  Caspian  Sea,  has  always 
been  remarkable  for  the  variety,  value,  and  abundance  of  its  agri- 
cultural products.  Many  of  the  very  early  historians  have  noted 
the  fact  that  each  one  of  the  countries  embraced  in  this  territory 
was  distinguished  for  the  excellence  and  numbers  of  horses  pro- 
duced, and  they  appear  in  about  the  following  order,  namely, 
Armenia,  Cappadocia,  Cilicia,  Media.  The  last-named  country 
embraced  what  is  now  the  northern  part  of  Persia,  and  as  between 
the  "Medes"  and  the  "Persians"  there  is  no  little  confusion  in 
the  public  mind,  as  sometimes  one  was  on  top  and  sometimes  the 
other.  Then,  to  add  to  the  confusion,  the  Assyrians  came  in, 
occupying  the  same  country  and  the  same  capitals.  For  our 
present  purposes  it  is  not  necessary  to  enter  into  the  considera- 
tion of  these  successive  dynasties.  The  Medes  were  comparatively 
newcomers,  and  as  they  were  a  great  military  people  their  promi- 
nence in  horse  history  resulted  more  from  the  spoils  of  war  and 
the  tribute  in  horses  that  they  collected  from  their  neighbors 
than  from  their  own  production.  Kitto  says  that  in  the  time  of 
the  Persian  empire  the  plain  of  Nissaeum  was  celebrated  for  its 
horses  and  horse  races.  This  plain  was  near  the  city  of  Nissaea, 
around  which  were  fine  pasture  lands,  producing  excellent  clover. 
The  horses  were  "entirely  white"  (probably  grey)  and  of  extraor- 
dinary height  and  beauty,  as  well  as  speed.  They  constituted 
part  of  the  luxury  of  the  great,  and  a  tribute  in  kind  was  paid 
from  them  to  the  monarch,  who,  like  all  Eastern  sovereigns,  used 
to  delight  in  equestrian  display.  Some  idea  of  the  opulence  of 
the  country  may  be  had  when  it  is  known  that,  independently  of 
imposts  rendered  in  money,  Media  (then  the  undermost  dog), 
paid  a  yearly  tribute  of  not  less  than  three  thousand  horses, 
four  thousand  mules,  and  nearly  one  hundred  thousand  sheep. 
The  races,  once  celebrated  through  the  world,  seem  to  exist  no 
more. 

When  Darius  the  Mede  had  extended  his  empire  over  the 
whole  of  Western  Asia  and  Egypt,  he  exacted  heavy  tribute  in 
horses  from  all  subjugated  provinces.  This  was  about  520  B.C., 
and  antedated  the  racing  referred  to  above.  In  all  parts  of  his 


ORIGINAL  HABITAT   OF  THE   HORSE.  31 

extended  empire  he  built  roads  and  established  lines  of  couriers, 
mounted  on  fleet  horses,  that  there  might  be  no  delay  in  receiv- 
ing at  his  capital  and  sending  out  again  intelligence  of  what  was 
transpiring  in  any  part  of  his  dominions.  For  this  service  the 
best  and  fleetest  horses  were  required,  and  the  only  guide  we 
have  to  determine  how  these  horses  were  selected  we  find  in  the 
fact  that  the  tribute  collected  from  the  little  kingdom  of  Cilicia, 
formerly  a  part  of  Cappadocia,  was,  in  addition  to  a  stated  sum  of 
money,  one  white  horse  for  every  day  in  the  year.  It  is  possible 
that  these  white  Cilician  horses  may  have  been  the  progenitors  of 
the  white  (grey)  race  horses  spoken  of  in  Media. 

In  describing  the  general  fruitfulness  of  Cappadocia,  Strabo 
says:  "Cappadocia  was  also  rich  in  herds  and  flocks,  but  more 
particularly  celebrated  for  its  breed  of  horses."  Strabo  speaks 
of  this  as  a  leading  characteristic  of  the  country  and  doubtless  it 
had  held  pre-eminence  in  this  respect  for  generations  before  he 
wrote.  Three  hundred  and  fifty-six  years  later,  when  Constan- 
tiuswas  selecting  his  presents  of  horses  for  the  prince  and  people 
of  Yemen,  in  Arabia,  he  knew  just  where  to  look,  in  all  his 
dominions,  for  the  best  of  their  kind,  and  selected  two  hundred 
"well-bred"  ones  for  Arabia.  Sir  R.  Wilson,  in  discussing  the 
quality  of  the  Russian  cavalry  horses  about  1810,  had  evidently 
heard  of  this  Cappadocian  origin  of  the  Arabian  horse,  but,  un- 
fortunately, he  got  all  the  parties  badly  mixed  in  his  reference. 
He  makes  Constantine  instead  of  Constantius  the  donor  of  three 
hundred  Cappadocian  horses,  instead  of  two  hundred,  and  they 
are  given  to  one  of  the  African  princes,  instead  of  to  an  Arabian 
prince.  The  African  traveler,  Bruce,  found  some  excellent  horses 
in  Nubia,  Africa,  and  from  their  high  quality  and  unusually  large 
size  he  seems  to  have  jumped  to  the  conclusion  that  these  were 
the  descendants  of  the  three  hundred  from  Constantine. 

After  glancing  over  all  the  different  countries  in  this  great 
zone  as  defined  above,  and  extending  from  the  Bosphorus  to  the 
Caspian  Sea,  one  cannot  fail  to  be  impressed  with  its  special 
adaptation  to  the  production  and  sustenance  of  all  varieties  of 
domestic  animals,  in  their  greatest  perfection.  Here  the  country 
seems  to  have  been  made  for  the  horse,  and  the  horse  for  the 
country.  Here  was  a  country  suited  to  his  nativity,  and  here  we 
find  records  of  his  existence  centuries  earlier  than  in  any  other 
country.  The  wild  ass  flourished  in  this  country,  but  I  have  not 
been  able  to  find  any  evidence  or  indication  that  the  horse  was 


32  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

not  always  the  companion  and  servant  of  man.  Wherever  he  is 
found  in  a  feral  state  reasons  that  are  amply  satisfactory  are 
never  wanting  to  account  for  that  state.  Ancient  historians  have 
specially  noted  each  of  the  principal  countries  embraced  in  this 
zone  for  the  superiority  and  numbers  of  its  horses,  but  no  one 
has  made  any  allusion  to  wild  horses,  nor  suggested  that  there 
may  have  been  a  time  when  their  ancestors  were  wild. 

Now,  as  we  have  designated  a  long  and  wide  region  of  Western 
Asia,  embracing  a  number  of  different  nationalities  and  govern- 
ments, as  the  probable  original  habitat  of  the  horse,  can  we  go 
further  and  designate  the  particular  nationality  or  government 
in  which  was  his  original  home  and  from  which  he  was  distrib- 
uted to  adjoining  nations  or  peoples?  In  answer  to  this  ques- 
tion, we  cannot  present  any  dates  of  record  earlier  than  about 
1700  B.C.,  and  this  date  will  apply  as  well  to  Media  and  Cappa- 
docia  as  to  Armenia.  We  must,  therefore,  consider  it  in  the 
light  of  other  facts  and  circumstances,  not  dependent  upon 
specific  dates.  In  the  first  place,  and  taking  the  Mosaic  account 
of  the  deluge  as  the  starting  point,  ''the  ark  rested  on  the  moun- 
tains of  Ararat."  This  is  the  original  name  of  a  country,  inter- 
sected by  a  mountain  range,  and  that  range  took  its  name  from 
the  country  in  which  it  was  found.  "Mount  Ararat"  was  simply 
a  very  high  peak  in  that  range.  The  distinction  should  be  ob- 
served here  between  "the  mountains  of  Ararat"  and  "Mount 
Ararat."  In  the  second  place,  it  is  clearly  established  by  all  his- 
tory that  near  the  base  of  this  mountain  range  Japheth  and  his 
descendants  had  their  homes.  His  son  Gomer  was  highly  dis- 
tinguished in  his  day,  and  his  grandson,  Togarmah,  son  of 
Gomer,  became  a  powerful  chief.  To  such  prominence  did  he 
rise  in  the  affairs  of  his  age  that  for  centuries  after  his  day  his 
country  was  called  "Togarmah."  Hence  we  have  the  three 
names,  Ararat,  Togarmah  and  Armenia  applied  in  sacred  and 
profane  history  to  the  same  country  that  we  are  now  considering. 

During  the  continuance  of  the  dynasty  of  King  Haic  or  Haicus, 
the  son  of  Togarmah,  the  Armenians  became  a  very  prosperous 
and  powerful  people.  They  did  not  seem  to  be  an  aggressive  or 
warlike  people,  although  their  boundaries  were  greatly  extended, 
but  a  thrifty  agricultural  and  industrious  people.  Breeding  and 
marketing  horses  seem  to  have  been  their  leading  employments. 
In  the  twenty-seventh  chapter  of  the  Prophet  Ezekiel  he  gives  a 
catalogue  of  the  different  peoples  trading  with  the  great 


ORIGINAL   HABITAT   OF  THE   HORSE.  33 

Phoenician  merchants  and  the  products  of  their  countries,  in  which 
they  traded.  This  catalogue  was  written  five  hundred  and  fifty- 
eight  years  before  the  Christian  era,  and  is  very  remarkable 
for  its  extent  and  completeness.  It  not  only  shows  what  the 
Phoenicians  carried  away  to  the  West,  in  their  "Ships  of 
Tarshish,"  but  also  what  they  brought  back  for  distribution 
among  their  customers  in  Western  Asia.  I  willquote,  from 
the  revised  version,  two  or  three  of  the  classes  of  articles 
enumerated,  embracing  both  import  and  export  trade.  Of 
foreign  imports  he  says:  "Tarshish"  (Spain  and  beyond)  "was 
thy  merchant  by  reason  of  the  multitude  of  all  kinds  of  riches; 
with  silver,  iron,  tin,  and  lead,  they  traded  for  thy  wares."  Of 
articles  for  export  he  says:  "They  of  the  house  of  Togarmah 
traded  for  thy  wares  with  horses  and  war-horses  and  mules." 
"Togarmah"  here  means  "Armenia,"  and  this  is  the  only  in- 
stance in  which  horses  are  mentioned  in  the  catalogue.  I  will 
give  another  quotation,  not  because  it  is- conclusive  in  itself,  but 
because  it  is  confirmatory  of  Strabo's  statement  that  there  were 
no  horses  in  Arabia  in  his  day.  He  says:  "Arabia  and  all  the 
princes  of  Kedar,  they  were  the  merchants  of  thy  hand;  in  lambs, 
and  rams,  and  goats,  in  these  were  they  thy  merchants."  Other 
products  from  more  southern  portions  of  Arabia  are  enumerated, 
but  no  horses.  This  is  the  initial  step  toward  the  general  dis- 
tribution of  horses,  by  the  Phoenician  merchants,  which  will  be 
developed  in  the  next  chapter. 

In  speaking  of  Media  (Vol.  II.,  p.  265),  Strabo  says:  "The 
country  is  peculiarly  adapted,  as  well  as  Armenia,  to  the  breed- 
ing of  horses."  Of  one  district  not  far  from  the  Caspian  he  re- 
marks: "Here,  it  is  said,  fifty  thousand  mares  were  pastured  in 
the  time  of  the  Persians,  and  were  the  king's  stud.  The  Nes- 
saean  horses,  the  best  and  the  largest  in  the  king's  province, 
were  of  this  breed,  according  to  some  writers,  but  according  to 
others  they  were  from  Armenia."  Again  he  says:  "Cappadocia 
paid  to  the  Persians,  yearly,  in  addition  to  a  tribute  in  silver, 
one  thousand  five  hundred  horses,  two  thousand  mules,  and  fifty 
thousand  sheep,  and  the  Medes  contributed  nearly  double  this 
amount." 

Of  Armenia  he  says,  p.  271:  "The  country  is  so  well  adapted, 
being  nothing  inferior  in  this  respect  to  Media,  for  breeding  horses 
that  the  race  of  Nessaean  horses,  which  the  king  of  Persia  used, 


34  THE    HOUSE    OF   AMERICA. 

is  found  here  also;  the  satrap  of  Armenia  used  to  send  annually 
to  the  king  of  Persia  twenty  thousand  young  horses." 

The  Nessaean  horses,  so  famous  for  their  speed,  were  the 
"thoroughbreds"  of  their  day,  and  there  can  hardly  be  a  doubt 
they  originated  in  Armenia,  and,  just  like  our  own  * 'thorough- 
breds," they  were  essentially  the  result  of  careful  selection 
through  a  series  of  generations,  and  of  breeding  only  from 
animals  possessing  the  desired  qualifications  in  the  highest 
degree.  In  the  earlier  days  of  racing  in  Media,  it  appears  that 
white  was  the  fashionable  color,  but  I  am  disposed  to  think  that 
grey,  growing  white  with  age,  was  the  color  intended  to  be  ex- 
pressed by  the  writers  of  that  period.  The  ''albino"  color  is 
abnormal  and  supposed  to  indicate  tenderness  and  lack  of  stamina. 

There  is  one  fact,  in  considering  this  question,  to  which  I  have 
probably  not  given  sufficient  prominence  and  weight.  So  far  as 
the  records  go,  the  three  countries  of  Armenia,  Cappadocia,  and 
Media  are  synchronous  in  having  mounted  troops  in  their 
armies  seventeen  hundred  years  before  the  Christian  era.  We 
must,  therefore,  consider  the  conditions  of  these  countries  ante- 
cedent to  the  period  of  1700  B.C.  Of  Cappadocia  we  know  abso- 
lutely nothing  historically  until  it  was  conquered  by  Cyrus,  king 
of  Persia,  about  588  B.C.  Of  Media  the  earliest  knowledge  we 
have  of  a  historical  character  does  not  go  back  further  than  about 
842  B.C.  It  should  be  observed  that  I  here  speak  of  "historical" 
knowledge  and  not  of  uncertain  traditions  of  many  centuries 
earlier.  Both  of  these  nations  with  their  distinctive  nationalities 
have,  long  since,  been  wiped  off  the  surface  of  the  earth. 

When  we  reach  Armenia,  we  reach  a  people  with  a  most  re- 
markable history,  extending  back  for  more  than  four  thousand 
years.  This  history,  although  not  wholly  free  from  criticism  or 
doubt,  seems  to  be  honestly  written  and  worthy  of  a  liberal 
measure  of  confidence.  That  the  children  of  Japheth  should 
have  settled  at  the  foot  of  the  mountains  of  Ararat  strikes  every 
one  as  a  very  natural  event,  but  that  their  descendants  should  still 
be  there,  through  all  the  triumphs  and  oppressions  of  four  thou- 
sand years,  is  one  of  the  most  stupendous  facts  in  the  history  of 
the  world.  From  the  very  first  we  know  of  them  they  seem  to 
have  been  an  agricultural  people,  strongly  attached  to  their 
native  soil.  When  they  ruled  over  the  land  from  the  Caspian  to 
the  Mediterranean,  they  built  no  great  cities,  but  adhered  stead- 
fastly to  the  rural  pursuits  of  their  fathers,  and  this,  probably, 


ORIGINAL   HABITAT   OF   THE   HORSE.  35 

was  the  chief  cause  of  their  weakness.  Their  wealth  and  sources 
of  wealth  were  chiefly  in  their  horses,  and  these  they  sold  to  the 
merchants  of  Sidon  and  Tyre,  who  carried  them  to  all  the  nations 
of  Europe  and  Africa,  commencing  with  Egypt,  and  supplying  all 
wants  as  far  as  Spain  and  Morocco,  and  beyond,  probably,  as  far 
as  Britain.  The  Phoenician  merchants  were  the  first  to  open 
commercial  transactions  with  Europe  and  Africa,  and  they  were 
in  control  of  the  commerce  of  the  world  long  before  King  Solomon 
entered  into  commercial  partnership  with  Hiram,  king  of  Tyre. 
Armenia  had  horses  to  sell  long  before  they  had  horses  in  Egypt, 
and  Phoenicia  had  ships  and  enterprise  to  carry  them  there. 
There  is  a  fitting  of  interests  here  that  seems  to  point  to  Armenia 
as  the  great  original  source  of  supply,  and  as  the  original  habitat 
of  the  horse. 


CHAPTER  III. 

EARLY   DISTRIBUTION    OF   HORSES. 

First  evidences  of  horses  in  Egypt  about  1700  B.C. — Supported  by  Egyptian 
records  and  history — The  Patriarch  Job  had  no  horses — Solomon's  great 
cavalry  force  organized — Arabia  as  described  by  Strabo  at  the  beginning  of 
our  era — No  horses  then  in  Arabia — Constantius  sends  two  hundred 
Cappadocian  horses  into  Arabia  A.D.  356 — Arabia  the  last  country  to  be 
supplied  with  horses — The  ancient  Phoenician  merchants  and  their  colonies 
— Hannibal's  cavalry  forces  in  the  Punic  Wars — Distant  ramifications  of 
Phoenician  trade  and  colonization — Commerce  reached  as  far  as  Britain  and 
the  Baltic — Probable  source  of  Britain's  earliest  horses. 

HAVING  considered  the  different  theories  or  opinions  as  to  the 
original  habitat  of  the  horse  and  the  means  and  facilities  by  which 
distribution  to  the  different  portions  of  the  earth  may  have  been 
effected,  I  have  omitted  land  migration,  which  will  be  self-evident 
to  all  as  an  important  factor  in  the  problem.  It  is  now  in  order, 
therefore,  to  consider  such  dates  and  facts  as  are  pertinent  and 
may  be  gleaned  from  history,  sacred  and  profane. 

When  Abraham,  with  Sarah  his  wife,  visited  Egypt  about  1920 
B.C.,  the  Pharaoh  for  her  sake  bestowed  upon  him  many  gifts: 
"Sheep  and  oxen  and  he  asses  and  men  servants  and  maid  serv- 
ants and  she  asses  and  camels."  Among  these  great  gifts  there 
were  no  horses,  evidently  because  Egypt  had  no  horses  at  that 
time.  There  is  no  mention  nor  reference  to  horses  in  Egypt  till 
Joseph  became  prime  minister  two  hundred  years  later,  when 
there  were  a  few  horses,  and  they  were  traded  or  sold  to  Joseph  by 
their  owners  in  exchange  for  food,  not  in  droves,  but  as  individ- 
uals. These  scriptural  facts  in  the  experiences  of  Abraham  and 
Joseph  seem  to  be  circumstantially  sustained  by  the  discoveries 
of  those  learned  Egyptologists  who,  in  late  years  and  with  the 
spade  in  their  hands,  have  resurrected  so  much  of  history  that  had 
been  buried  for  thousands  of  years.  It  was  during  the  reign  of 
the  Hyksos,  or  Shepherd  Kings,  that  Abraham  and  Joseph  were 
in  Egypt,  and  in  order  to  approximate  the  time  when  horses  were 
first  introduced,  we  must  glance  at  a  few  facts  in  connection  with 


•fc 


EARLY   DISTRIBUTION   OF   HORSES.  37 

what  is  known  of  the  Hyksos.  Some  have  claimed  they  were  from 
Chaldea,  some  from  Northern  Syria  and  Asia  Minor,  and  some 
again  from  Phoenicia,  and  it  is  one  of  the  strangest  things  in  his- 
tory that  a  great  nation  should  be  overthrown  and  held  in  sub- 
jection for  over  five  hundred  years  and  nobody  know  who  did  it. 
Then  again,  it  is  equally  incomprehensible  that  any  nation  should 
have  subdued  Egypt  and  held  it  in  bondage  so  long  and  yet  never 
have  claimed  the  honor  of  having  done  so.  Still  another  mystery 
remains  that  never  has  been  solved,  and  that  is,  what  became  of 
the  Shepherds  and  their  followers  when  they  were  driven  out? 
At  the  period  of  the  conquest  the  governing  class  was  rent  by 
factions  and  under  a  weak  and  tyrannical  king.  The  Delta  and 
the  Valley  of  the  Nile  were  crowded  with  slaves,  many  of  them 
of  Asiatic  origin.  The  elevated  plains  and  mountain  sides  were 
covered  with  fierce  and  intractable  nomads,  all  of  Asiatic  origin, 
tending  their  flocks.  Some  brave  and  skillful  shepherd  organized 
the  shepherds  and  the  slaves  and  at  their  head  swept  down  upon 
the  government  with  a  power  that  was  so  mighty  as  to  be  irre- 
sistible. Manetho,  the  great  Egyptian  historian  of  more  than 
two  thousand  years  ago,  thus  describes  the  event:  * 'Under  this 
king,  then,  I  know  not  wherefore,  the  god  caused  to  blow  upon 
us  a  baleful  wind,  and  in  the  face  of  all  probability  bands  from 
the  East,  people  of  ignoble  race,  came  upon  us  unawares,  at- 
tacked the  country  and  subdued  it  easily  and  without  fighting." 
In  remarking  upon  this  same  event  Professor.  Maspero,  who  stands 
at  the  very  head  of  the  Egyptologists,  says:  "It  is  possible  that  they 
(the  shepherds)  owed  this  rapid  victory  to  the  presence  in  their 
armies  of  a  factor  hitherto  unknown  to  the  Africans — the  war 
chariot — and  before  the  horse  and  his  driver  the  Egyptians  gave 
way  in  a  body."  In  view  of  the  direct  declaration  of  Manetho 
that  the  question  of  the  succession  was  settled  "without  fight- 
ing," the  mere  suggestion  of  an  unsustained  "possibility"  from 
Maspero  that  the  result  may  have  been  determined  by  the  war 
chariots  cannot  be  accepted.  All  the  authorities  agree  that  the 
horse  was  introduced  into  Egypt  at  some  period  during  the  rule 
of  the  Shepherd  Kings,  but  there  is  absolutely  no  evidence  that 
this  was  at  the  beginning  or  anywhere  near  the  beginning  of  that 
rule. 

No  records  or  delineations  of  the  horse  have  been  found  in  any 
of  the  temples  or  tombs  of  Egypt  prior  to  the  beginning  of  the 
eighteenth  dynasty,  which  was  probably  about  the  year  1570  B.C. 


38  THE   HOESE   OF   AMERICA. 

and  contemporaneous  with  the  birth  of  Moses.  If  the  Shepherd 
Kings  left  behind  them  any  records  or  delineations  of  the  horse 
it  would  be  quite  natural  for  the  true  kingly  line  to  destroy  and 
erase  every  vestige  of  whatever  would  revive  a  memory  to  them  so- 
bitter  and  hateful.  But  the  absence  of  all  traces  of  horses  under 
the  seventeenth  dynasty  of  the  Shepherds  does  not  prove  that 
there  was  none,  for  we  have  direct  proof  in  Joseph's  case  that 
they  were  there  one  hundred  and  fifty-six  years,  and  in  Jacob's 
burial  one  hundred  and  nineteen  years  before  the  beginning  of 
the  eighteenth  dynasty. 

The  question  as  to  the  time  when  they  procured  their  horses 
having  now  been  approximately  settled,  the  inquiry  naturally 
follows  as  to  where  they  came  from?  In  answering  this  question 
there  seems  to  be  no  hesitation  or  doubt.  They  came  from 
Northern  Syria,  which  embraces  not  only  the  northeastern 
coast  of  the  Mediterranean,  including  Phoenicia,  but  the  countries 
north  and  east  of  it  trading  there,  which  means  the  great  horse- 
breeding  countries  of  Armenia  and  Cappadocia.  Being  largely 
engaged  in  the  Egyptian  trade  for  many  centuries,  it  is  probable 
the  Phoenician  merchants  were  the  principal  agents  in  supplying- 
them.  In  speaking  of  the  horse  in  Egypt,  Prof.  Maspero  says: 
"The  horse  when  once  introduced  into  Egypt  soon  became  fairly 
adapted  to  its  environment.  It  retained  both  its  height  and 
size,  keeping  the  convex  forehead — which  gave  the  head  a  slightly 
curved  profile — the  slender  neck,  the  narrow  hind-quarters,  the 
lean  and  sinewy  legs  and  the  long,  flowing  tail  which  had  char- 
acterized it  in  its  native  country.  The  climate,  however,  was 
enervating,  and  constant  care  had  to  be  taken,  by  the  introduc-  • 
tion  of  new  blood  from  Syria,  to  prevent  the  breed  from  de- 
teriorating. The  Pharaohs  kept  studs  of  horses  in  the  principal 
cities  of  the  Nile  valley,  and  the  great  feudal  lords,  following  their 
example,  vied  with  each  other  in  the  possession  of  numerous 
breeding  stables." 

There  are  some  facts  here  that  are  worthy  of  special  emphasis: 
(1)  There  were  no  horses  in  Egypt  till  the  period  of  the  Shepherd 
Kings,  i.e.,  about  the  time  of  Joseph.  (2)  All  Egyptologists 
down  to  the  present  day  agree  that  the  supply  of  Egyptian  horses 
was  procured  from  Northern  Syria.  (3)  The  Egyptians  and  the 
Arabians  were  adjoining  nations  in  constant,  friendly  intercourse, 
exchanging  the  products  of  their  respective  countries,  and  yet 
there  is  no  shadow  of  an  intimation  that  the  Arabians  had  then 


EARLY    DISTRIBUTION    OF   HORSES.  39 

ever  owned  a  horse.  It  is  reasonable  to  conclude,  therefore,  not 
only  from  what  is  written,  but  from  what  is  implied,  that  the 
Arabians  at  about  the  period  of  1600  B.C.  had  no  horses.  North- 
ern Syria,  as  the  source  of  Egyptian  supply,  points  directly  to 
Armenia,  adjoining  on  the  east,  as  the  original  source.  When 
Strabo  wrote  at  the  beginning  of  the  Christian  era  that  there 
were  no  horses  in  Arabia  at  that  time,  he  would  still  have  been 
within  the  bounds  of  the  truth  if  ne  had  said  there  had  been 
none  there  for  more  the  sixteen  hundred  years  before  his  day. 
All  these  considerations  confirm  the  history  that  has  come  down 
to  us  from  Philostorgius. 

As  early  as  the  dynasties  of  the  Shepherd  Kings  and  while  the 
Israelites  were  still  in  Egyptian  bondage,  the  Phoenician  mer- 
chants had  accumulated  great  wealth  and  great  power  and  were 
literally  the  masters  of  the  seas.  The  Pho3iiicians  were  a  com- 
mercial and  maritime  people  and  the  Egyptians  were,  in  fact,  de- 
pendent upon  them  for  all  their  foreign  supplies.  These  condi- 
tions leave  hardly  a  doubt  that  Egypt's  first  supply  of  horses  came 
through  the  Phoenicians.  But  upon  the  establishment  of  the 
eighteenth  dynasty  under  the  old  Thebans,  the  spirit  of  war  and 
conquest  revived,  and  under  Thutmosis  I.  and  Thutmosis  III., 
notably,  numerous  and  successful  campaigns  were  made  against 
Northern  Syria  and  then  extending  eastward  across  the  Euphrates 
into  the  borders  of  Armenia  and  Assyria.  And  from  the  number 
of  horses  and  chariots  captured  in  battle  and  collected  as  tribute, 
the  careful  student  cannot  avoid  the  conclusion  that  this  kind  of 
spoil  was  the  chief  incentive  to  the  various  campaigns.  "Besides 
the  usual  species,"  Maspero  informs  us,  "powerful  stallions  were 
imported  from  Northern  Syria,  which  were  known  by  the  Semitic 
name  of  Abiri,  the  strong."  This  is  the  first  mention  in  history 
of  an  improved  type  of  horse  noted  for  his  strength. 

Whatever  may  have  been  the  precise  period  in  which  the  Patri- 
arch Job  lived,  he  was  the  author  of  the  grandest  panegyric  on 
the  war-horse  that  ever  was  written.  Yet  it  seems  strange  that 
he  owned  seven  thousand  sheep,  three  thousand  camels,  five 
hundred  yoke  of  oxen  and  five  hundred  she  asses,  but  did  not 
own  a  horse.  To  draw  his  picture  of  the  war-horse  he  must  have 
seen  him  in  action,  on  the  field,  and  it  is  not  improbable  in  his 
younger  days  he  witnessed,  or  possibly  participated  in,  some  great 
battle  between  the  Babylonians  and  the  Persians,  north  of  the 
latitude  and  country  in  which  he  lived.  It  is  now  generally  con- 


40  THE   HOUSE    OF   AMERICA. 

ceded,  I  think,  among  learned  men  that  the  "land  of  Uz"  was  in 
the  southeastern  portion  of  Arabia  Deserta,  bordering  on  the 
Persian  Gulf,  where  the  horse  is  a  useless  luxury.  Job  was  a 
very  rich  man,  he  certainly  did  not  lack  in  admiration  of  the 
horse,  and  if  he  had  thought  that  horses  would  add  to  his  comfort 
and  enjoyment  he  could  easily  have  obtained  them  from  the  great 
herds  in  the  north.  But  the  camel  is  the  great  beast  of  service 
and  utility  in  Arabia;  it  was  so  in  Job's  time,  it  is  so  to-day,  and 
it  always  will  be  so  because  it  is  suited  to  the  environment. 

When  Joshua  was  subduing  the  tribes  of  Canaan,  B.C.  1450,  he 
found  that  the  Phoenicians  had  several  well-fortified  cities  and 
did  not  attack  them,  but  he  encountered  a  combination  of 
"Northern  Kings"  with  a  vast  army  and  "with  horses  and  chariots 
very  many."  His  victory  was  complete,  and  he  houghed  their 
horses  and  burned  their  chariots  with  fire. 

Jabin,  called  the  King  of  Canaan,  in  the  time  of  the  Judges, 
had  his  kingdom  on  the  northern  border  of  Palestine  and  east  of 
Phoenicia,  at  the  southern  extension  of  Mount  Lebanon.  Sisera, 
one  of  the  greatest  commanders  of  the  time,  B.C.  1285,  com- 
manded his  army  and  he  had  nine  hundred  chariots  of  iron,  but 
the  victory  of  the  Israelites  was  complete. 

In  the  year  B.C.  1056,  David  pursued  some  of  the  tribes  of 
Western  Arabia  that  had  made  a  raid  on  Southern  Palestine  and 
carried  away  many  captives  and  much  spoil.  He  overtook  them 
with  his  own  followers  and  subdued  them,  and  none  escaped  ex- 
cept four  hundred  young  men  who  fled  on  camels.  He  recovered 
all  the  captives  and  brought  back  all  the  flocks  and  herds,  but 
there  were  no  horses  among  them.  About  the  same  time,  his- 
torians inform  us,  the  tribes  of  Eastern  Arabia  were  paying  their 
tribute  to  the  Assyrians  in  camels  and  asses,  while  the  northern 
countries  were  paying  theirs  in  horses  and  money. 

The  Queen  of  Sheba  visited  King  Solomon  B.C.  992,  to  learn  of 
his  wisdom  and  "to  prove  him  with  hard  questions."  Her  king- 
dom was  in  that  part  of  southeastern  Arabia  now  called  Yemen, 
bordering  on  the  Red  Sea.  Her  journey  was  a  very  long  one  and 
she  "came  with  a  very  great  train  of  camels  that  bare  spices  and 
very  much  gold  and  precious  stones."  It  will  be  observed  that 
there  were  no  horses  in  this  "very  great  train."  It  will  be  ob- 
served further,  from  the  incidents  above  related,  that  whenever 
the  Israelites  met  their  neighbors  north  of  them,  whether  in 
peace  or  war,  they  met  horses  with  them;  and  whenever  they  met 


EARLY   DISTRIBUTION   OF   HORSES.  41 

their   neighbors    south    of  them,  they  were  mounted  only  on 
camels. 

When  the  dominions  of  Solomon  had  become  vastly  extended, 
embracing  numbers  of  tributary  kingdoms,  as  well  as  nomadic 
tribes,  and  when  his  ships  had  gathered  in  untold  riches  from  all 
parts  of  the  world,  he  found  it  prudent  to  reorganize  his  army 
for  the  defense  of  his  kingdom  and  his  wealth,  and  on  a  scale 
commensurate  with  the  dangers  that  might  arise  from  a  combina- 
tion of  the  jealous  and  envious  neighbors  with  whom  he  was  sur- 
rounded. Among  the  northern  kingdoms  of  that  day  it  had  been 
often  demonstrated  in  battle  that  the  effective  force  of  an  army 
must  be  estimated  by  its  strength  in  horsemen  and  chariots  of 
war.  Solomon,  therefore,  bought  horses  and  chariots  from  Egypt, 
and  horses  from  all  lands  that  had  them  for  sale.  It  is  probable 
that  the  superiority  of  the  Egyptian  chariots  was  the  special 
reason  for  buying  them  in  that  country,  as  he  paid  six  hundred 
shekels  of  silver  for  the  chariots  and  one  hundred  and  fifty  for 
the  horses  to  bring  them  home.  The  reorganized  army  consisted 
of  one  thousand  four  hundred  chariots  and  twelve  thousand  horse- 
men, and  they  were  quartered  in  the  different  large  cities  in  his 
dominions.  In  the  interval  of  seven  hundred  and  twenty-eight 
years  that  had  elapsed  since  Joseph  was  Prime  Minister,  and 
horses  introduced  in  Egypt,  they  had  greatly  multiplied.  When 
Solomon  died  and  his  kingdom  was  divided  into  two  hostile 
camps,  Hiram,  King  of  Tyre,  his  lifelong  friend  and  associate, 
became  virtually  his  successor  to  the  trade  of  the  world. 

The  great  Greek  geographer,  Strabo,  traveled  and  wrote  in 
the  reign  of  Augustus,  and  died  A.D.  24.  For  descriptions  of  all 
countries  of  that  period  and  their  industries  and  productions,  he 
has  been  quoted  for  eighteen  hundred  years  as  the  best  if  not  the 
only  authority.  Writing  as  he  did,  at  the  very  initial  point  of 
the  Christian  era,  he  gives  us  a  landmark  that  fixes  itself  in  the 
mind.  He  gives  a  brief,  but  quite  satisfactory,  description  of 
Arabia,  in  which  he  notes  the  general  topography  and  boundaries 
as  they  are  understood  to-day;  and  then  he  enters,  somewhat, 
into  the  climate,  productions  of  the  soil,  character  and  industries 
of  the  people,  etc.  Of  one  part  of  the  country  he  speaks  of  the 
inhabitants  as  breeders  of  camels,  and  of  another,  that  is  more 
productive,  he  remarks:  ''The  general  fertility  of  the  country  is 
very  great;  among  other  products  there  is  in  particular  an 
abundant  supply  of  honey.  Except  horses,  there  are  numerous 


42  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

herds  of  animals,  asses  and  swine,  birds  also  of  every  kind,  ex- 
cept geese  and  the  gallinaceous  tribes." 

Here  we  have  from  the  very  highest  authority  the  pivotal  fact 
that  there  were  no  horses  in  Arabia  at  the  commencement  of  the 
Christian  era.  This  does  not  rest  upon  argument,  nor  is  it  a 
deduction  from  some  condition  of  things  that  might  have  existed; 
but  it  is  a  distinct  declaration  of  what  Strabo  saw  with  his  own 
eyes  and  wrote  down  when  he  saw  it.  It  must,  therefore,  stand 
as  an  undisputed  fact,  until  some  reputable  authority  is  brought 
forward  to  contradict  it.  This  description  from  Strabo  applies 
to  that  rich  portion  of  Arabia,  bordering  on  the  Eed  Sea  along 
its  full  length.  With  the  fact  established,  circumstantially  and 
historically,  that  there  were  no  horses  in  Arabia  at  the  beginning 
of  the  Christian  era,  it  now  remains  to  consider  how  and  when 
they  were  first  introduced  in  that  country. 

Philostorgius,  a  distinguished  Greek  theologian,  born  A.D.  425, 
as  related  in  the  preceding  chapter,  wrote  an  ecclesiastical  his- 
tory, which  is  no  longer  extant,  but  fortunately  Photius,  at  one 
time  patriarch  of  the  Eastern  church,  born  A.D.  853,  prepared  an 
epitome  of  it.  This  epitome  of  Philostorgius  comes  down  to 
A.D.  425,  and  is  to  be  found  in  the  Lenox  Library  of  this  city, 
bound  up  in  the  same  volume  with  Sozomen's  Ecclesiastical 
History.  I  will  here  quote  literally  from  this  epitome  so  much 
as  is  pertinent  to  the  question  before  us.  Constantius  was  then 
on  the  throne  of  the  Eastern  Empire,  and  labored  for  the  pro- 
motion of  the  Christian  religion. 

"  Constantius  sent  ambassadors  to  those  who  were  formerly  called  Sabaeans, 
but  are  now  known  as  Homeritae,  H  tribe  descended  from  Abraham,  by  Keturah. 
As  to  the  territory  which  they  inhabit,  it  is  called  by  the  Greeks  Magna  Arabia 
and  Arabia  Felix,  and  extends  t  >  the  most  distant  part  of  the  ocean.  Its 
metropolis  is  Saba,  the  city  from  which  the  Queen  of  Sheba  went  forth  to  see 
Solomon.  .  .  .  Constantius,  accordingly,  sent  ambassadors  to  them  to 
come  over  to  the  Christian  religion.  .  .  .  Constantius,  wishing  to  array 
the  embassy  with  peculiar  splendor,  put  on  board  their  ships  two  hundred 
well-bred  horses  from  Cappadocia,  and  sent  them,  with  many  other  gifts.  . 
.  .  The  embassy  turned  out  successfully,  for  the  prince  of  the  nation,  by 
sincere  conviction,  came  over  to  the  true  religion." 

Other  facts  might  be  quoted  from  this  epitome,  showing  that 
Theopholis  was  made  a  bishop  and  placed  at  the  head  of  this  em- 
bassy and  that,  he  remained  in  Arabia  Felix  several  years,  prose- 


EARLY   DISTRIBUTION    OF   HORSES.  43 

outing  his  work  successfully.  It  might  also  be  quoted  to  show 
that  the  people  of  the  cities  of  Yemen  (Arabia  Felix)  were,  at 
that  day,  well  advanced  in  civilization  and  refinement,  and  that 
wealth  and  luxury  abounded  on  all  sides.  Their  lands,  from  the 
sea  to  the  desert,  were  wonderfully  productive,  and  their  people 
lived  in  the  cities  and  on  their  farms,  but  few  leading  a  nomadic 
life.  In  later  generations  this  part  of  the  country,  which  is  in 
Arabia  Felix,  has  been  called  Yemen,  and  I  believe  it  is  univer- 
sally conceded  among  the  Arab  tribes  and  by  writers  who  have 
studied  the  subject  that  the  best  horses  come  from  Yemen. 

Taking  the  administration  of  Joseph  as  indicating  the  time 
when  the  first  horses  were  introduced  into  Egypt,  about  B.C. 
1720,  and  the  actual  date  when  Constantius  sent  the  first  into 
Arabia,  A.D.  356,  we  find  that  Egypt  led  Arabia  by  two  thousand 
and  seventy-six  years.  And  yet  numbers  of  men  have  written 
great  pretentious  books  on  the  horse,  in  which  they  tell  us  that 
the  Egyptians  got  their  horses  from  the  Arabians;  while  others 
equally  pretentious  and  voluminous  tell  us  the  Arabians  got  their 
horses  from  the  Egyptians;  and  neither  class  probably  ever  gave 
the  labor  of  an  honest  hour  to  settle  this  question.  The  one  is 
over  two  thousand  years  out  of  the  way,  and  still  they  know  just 
as  much  about  it  as  the  other  knows.  They  are  both  equally 
ignorant  and  equally  dishonest,  for  they  simply  copied,  as  their 
own,  what  somebody  had  said  before  them. 

It  is  conceded  on  all  hands  and  by  all  men  who  have  gone  beneath 
the  mere  surface,  that  the  literature  of  the  ages  furnishes  no 
evidence  that  there  were  horses  in  Arabia  before  the  fourth  or 
fifth  century  of  our  era.  General  Tweedie,  by  far  the  ablest 
writer  on  the  Arabian  horse  that  we  have  examined,  concedes 
the  pertinency  and  force  of  the  absence  of  all  literary  evidence, 
until  the  fifth  century  is  reached,  and  as  a  reply  he  says:  "The  sev- 
eral Roman  invasions  of  Arabia,  in  the  reigns  of  Augustus,  Trajan, 
and  Severus,  must  have  left  foreign  horses  behind  them."  This 
is,  in  fact,  conceding  the  accuracy  of  Strabo's  representations  and 
that  there  were  no  horses  in  Arabia  at  the  beginning  of  the 
Christian  era.  The  truth  of  the  historical  allusion  is  that  the 
Romans  never  overran  nor  conquered  Arabia.  They  could  skir- 
mish around  the  border  and  capture  a  few  towns  or  cities,  but 
the  death -dealing  desert  was  too  much  for  them.  Trajan  at  last 
made  it  a  Roman  province  by  his  proclamation,  and  not  by  his 
sword,  and  for  the  excellent  reason  that  "the  game  was  not  worth 


44  THE    HOESE    OF    AMERICA. 

the  candle."  What  a  strange  fact  it  is  that  Arabia,  instead  of 
the  first,  should  have  been  the  last  country  in  all  the  old  world  to 
be  supplied  with  horses! 

It  is  very  difficult  to  comprehend  or  even  imagine  the  changes 
that  may  be  wrought  in  a  thousand  years  by  a  strong,  enterpris- 
ing, and  aggressive  people,  colonized  in  a  rich  country  occupied 
by  semi-barbarians  and  savages.  This  was  the  condition  in 
Northern  Africa,  when  the  Phoenician  colonies  were  planted 
there,  a  thousand  years  before  the  Christian  era.  The  colony  at 
Utica  in  Algeria  was  planted  about  eleven  hundred  years  before 
the  Christian  era,  which  was  contemporaneous  with  the  reign  of 
Saul  as  king  of  Israel.  The  colony  of  Carthage,  that  afterward 
contested  with  Rome  for  universal  dominion,  was  planted  in  the 
same  country,  about  two  hundred  years  later,  and  was  contem- 
poraneous with  Jehu.  The  whole  southern  shore  of  the  Mediter- 
ranean was  dotted  with  Phoenician  colonies,  from  Egypt  west- 
ward. 

The  oldest  of  the  Phoenician  colonies  so  far  from  home  was 
probably  Gades,  now  called  Cadiz,  on  the  Atlantic  coast  of  Spain 
and  outside  of  the  Pillars  of  Hercules.  This  colony  was  planted 
about  fifteen  hundred  years  B.C.  and  was  contemporaneous  with 
Moses  and  the  forty  years'  journeying  of  the  Israelites  in  the- 
wilderness.  The  more  recent  scholarship  seems  to  have  de- 
veloped the  fact  that  still  north  of  Gades  and  extending  from 
the  mouth  of  the  Guadelete  to  that  of  the  Guadiana,  there  was  a 
very  large  and  flourishing  colony  planted  by  the  Phoenicians, 
possessing  within  itself  many  of  the  requisites  and  functions  of 
statehood,  and  that  this  was  the  ancient  "Tarshish"  of  scripture. 
This  plantation  became  a  secondary  Tyre,  and  the  "ships  of  Tar- 
shish"  not  only  made  their  voyages  back  and  forth  through  the 
length  of  the  Mediterranean,  but  extended  them  northward,  up 
the  European  coast  and  to  Britain,  and  southward  along  the 
African  coast  for  a  great  distance,  establishing  trading  posts 
wherever  the  products  of  a  country  promised  profitable  exchange. 

The  planting  of  colonies  in  that  age,  even  for  the  one  ostensi- 
ble purpose  of  trade,  involved  more  than  the  mere  erection  of  a 
"trading  post"  at  some  selected  harbor.  A  strong  and  well- 
equipped  and  well-trained  military  force  had  to  be  employed  to 
protect  and  defend  them.  The  Phoenicians  were  great  traders, 
and  at  the  same  time  they  were  excellent  fighters.  Their  numer- 
ous colonies  on  both  shores  of  the  Mediterranean  required  a 


EARLY    DISTRIBUTION   OF   HORSES.  45 

strong  military  force  that  was, made  up  very  largely  of  slaves  and 
the  nomadic  tribes  of  the  country,  but  always  commanded  by 
prominent  and  influential  Phoenicians.  It  is  impossible  to  tell 
what  the  very  early  experiences  of  the  colonists  may  have  been 
with  regard  to  horses;  nor  do  we  know  whether  they  found  horses 
already  there  when  they  arrived  at  their  new  plantations.  My 
belief  is,  however,  that  they  were  not  only  the  first  to  carry 
horses  to  Egypt,  but  they  were  the  first  to  carry  them  to  the 
western  extremities  of  the  Mediterranean.  It  will  be  remembered 
that  the  early  trade  of  the  Armenians  with  the  Phoenician  mer- 
chants was  not  only  in  horses,  but  in  horsemen,  and  it  is  probable 
that  these  "horsemen"  were  slaves,  expert  and  skillful  in  managing 
the  horse.  It  has  been  said  by  historians  that  certain  classes  of 
their  ships  were  ornamented  with  a  carved  horse's  head,  at  the 
prow;  and  it  has  been  inferred  that  the  ships  so  designated  vere 
specially  constructed  and  fitted  up  for  the  safe  carrying  of  horses. 
It  is  true  that  in  the  course  of  the  centuries  horses  may  have 
found  their  way  from  Egypt  westward  to  Algeria,  and  by  crossing 
the  Bosphorus  they  might  have  found  their  "way  from  Asia 
Minor  to  Spain,  but  it  is  also  true  that  from  small  beginnings  at 
the  plantation  of  the  colonies  there  was  ample  time  for  them  to 
increase  to  almost  countless  herds  before  the  period  when  the 
colonists  became  a  mighty  military  power  in  the  earth. 

Historians  tell  us  that  the  military  establishment  of  the  city 
of  Carthage  alone,  when  on  a  peace  footing,  consisted  of  three 
hundred  elephants,  four  thousand  horses  and  forty  thousand  foot 
soldiers.  When  Hannibal  started  out  to  fight  Rome,  in  the  second 
Punic  war,  say  B.C.  218,  he  had  with  him  eighty  thousand  foot- 
men and  twelve  thousand  horsemen;  and  he  left  thirty -two  thou- 
sand soldiers  at  home  to  guard  his  Spanish  and  his  African 
dominions.  With  a  proportional  division  of  the  home  troops,  he 
then  had  about  seventeen  thousand  mounted  men  in  his  army. 
These  were  not  war  levies,  but  hardened  and  trained  soldiers,  and 
it  is,  therefore,  not  remarkable  that  he  held  nearly  the  whole  of 
Spain  in  subjection,  and  practically  all  of  Northwestern  Africa. 
Polybius,  the  soldier  historian,  tells  us  that  "his  Numidian 
cavalry  formed  the  strongest  part  of  his  army,  and  to  their  quick 
evolutions,  their  sudden  retreat,  and  their  rapid  return  to  the 
charge,  may  be  attributed  the  success  of  Hannibal  in  his  great 
victories."  At  an  earlier  period,  we  learn  that  in  the  organiza- 
tion of  the  Phoenician  armies  the  numerous  nomadic  tribes  were 


46  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

placed  on  their  flanks,  and  wheeled  about  on  unsaddled  horses 
guided  by  a  bridle  of  rushes. 

At  a  very  remote  period  there  were  two  tribes  in  the  interior  of 
Spain,  the  Celtae  and  Iberi,  that  were  greatly  distinguished  for 
their  love  of  independence  and  their  bravery  in  defending  it. 
The  antiquarians  have  failed  to  give  us  any  information  as  to- 
what  they  were  or  whence  they  came.  They  were  contempo- 
raneous with  some  of  the  early  colonies  of  the  Phoenicians.  Their 
tactics  in  battle  seemed  to  have  been  to  break  the  enemy's  ranks  by 
a  charge  as  cavalry,  and  to  then  dismount  and  fight  on  foot.  They 
united  as  one  people  and  called  themselves  Celtiberi.  Where' 
they  got  their  horses,  or  whether  they  had  them  before  the- 
Phoenicians  arrived,  are  questions  that  cannot  be  answered. 

The  Visigoths,  or  western  Goths,  overran  Northern  Italy,  set- 
tled in  Southern  France  and  eventually  passed  over  into  Spain, 
where  they  established  a  dynasty  that  lasted  over  two  centuries  and 
until  it  was  overthrown  by  the  Saracens,  A.D.  711.  Roderick, 
the  king  of  the  Visigoths,  went  out  to  battle  with  the  Saracens, 
arrayed  in  his  most  showy  apparel,  and  mounted  on  his  splendid 
chariot,  made  of  ivory  and  set  with  precious  stones.  As  the  bat- 
tle progressed  he  saw  what  he  had  good  reason  to  believe  was 
treachery  on  the  part  of  one  wing  of  his  army  and  he  alighted 
from  his  chariot,  mounted  his  horse  called  Orelia  and  rode  away 
while  his  soldiers  were  being  butchered.  He  was  the  last  of  the 
Gothic  dynasty.  There  had  been  a  battle  between  the  navies  of  the 
Saracens  and  the  Goths,  A.D.  680,  fifty-one  years  earlier,  in  which 
the  fleet  of  the  Saracens  had  been  entirely  destroyed,  and  at  that 
time  the  Saracens  occupied  the  whole  of  the  southern  shore  of 
the  Mediterranean.  The  word  "Moors,"  as  often  used  to  desig- 
nate the  people  of  Northern  Africa,  is  not  well  chosen,  for  it  really 
belongs  to  but  one  of  many  different  tribes  of  different  names. 
The  term  "Saracen"  anciently  meant  only  an  Arab  born,  but 
since  the  middle  ages  it  has  come  to  mean  any  and  all  adherents 
to  the  Mohammedan  religion,  in  the  usage  of  Christian  people, 
and  is  particularly  apposite  when  speaking  of  a  number  of  tribes 
engaged  in  a  common  cause. 

The  people  of  Northern  Africa  were  not  negroes  as  we  under- 
stand the  word,  but  a  mixture  of  different  races.  When  the 
Phoenicians  settled  among  them  they  were  nomadic  barbarians, 
possessing  a  country  of  great  riches  without  knowing  it.  Under 
the  tuition  of  their  new  masters  they  made  great  advances  in 


EARLY   DISTRIBUTION   OF   HORSES.  4? 

\ 

many  of  the  arts  of  peace  and  in  all  the  arts  of  war.  The  Phoeni- 
cian blood  was  liberally  commingled  with  that  of  the  natives. 
The  blood  carried  the  brains,  and  hence  the  beautiful  structiires 
that  came  from  their  hands  and  heads.  No  purely  bred  nomad 
ever  could  have  conceived  or  constructed  the  Alhambra.  The 
Phoenicians  were  refined  and  educated  idolaters,  as  refinement  and 
education  were  understood  in  their  day,  while  the  native  people 
were  literally  barbarians. 

The  then  recent  and  rapid  spread  of  Mohammedanism  among 
all  the  people  of  Northern  Africa  is,  on  its  surface,  one  of  the 
most  remarkable  facts  in  history.  As  a  religion  it  served  to 
unite,  under  the  banner  of  the  Crescent,  all  who  accepted  it,  and 
guaranteed  to  all  who  fell  in  its  defense  immediate  admission  to 
paradise.  All  who  did  not  accept  it  were  enemies  and  only  fit  to 
perish  by  the  sword  of  the  Saracen.  The  founder  of  this  religion 
died  A.D.  632,  and  seventy -nine  years  afterward  his  followers,  in 
Northern  Africa  alone,  won  their  great  victory  over  the  .Gothic 
dynasty  of  Spain.  When  once  on  Spanish  soil  they  appeared  to 
take  root  there  and  held  possession  of  a  large  part  of  Spain  for 
nearly  nine  hundred  years. 

Now  that  I  have  traversed  the  field  of  Spain  and  Northern 
Africa,  from  the  first  dawnings  of  history  down  to  the  beginning 
of  the  seventeenth  century,  in  order  to  gather  in  all  that  history 
reveals  touching  the  introduction  and  propagation  of  the  horse 
in  those  regions,  we  are  ready  to  summarize  the  facts  that  we 
have  gleaned.  At  the  periods  of  six  hundred  (when  Carthage  be- 
came independent  of  the  mother  country),  four  hundred,  and 
two  hundred  years  before  the  Christian  era,  there  is  undoubted 
evidence,  over  and  over  again,  that  Spain  and  Northern  Africa 
were  abundantly  supplied  with  horses.  Then,  how  is  it  possible 
that  the  hordes  of  Barbarians  from  Asia  could  have  supplied  these 
countries  with  horses,  when  they  did  not  arrive  there  until 
several  centuries  after  the  supply  is  established  to  have  existed  ? 
Take,  if  you  please,  the  shortest  of  the  periods  suggested  above, 
when  Hannibal's  cavalry  almost  annihilated  a  great  Roman  army, 
two  hundred  and  sixteen  years  before  the  Christian  era.  This 
was  five  hundred  and  seventy-two  years  before  Arabia  had  any 
horses;  and  how  can  "the  blind  leaders  of  the  blind"  supply 
Hannibal's  cavalry  with  Arabian  blood?  When  the  people  of 
Northern  Africa,  west  of  Egypt,  fought  their  way  into  Spain  it  is 
not  known  that  there  was  a  single  Arabian  soldier  nor  a  single 


48  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

Arabian  horse  in  the  whole  army.     They  were  all  called  Arabians, 
however,  and  that  pretense  has  existed  ever  since. 

The  Phoenicians  were  the  most  remarkable  people  of  all  the 
early  ages  and  indeed  of  any  age.  They  belonged  to  the  Aramaic 
or  Semitic  race;  they  settled  in  Canaan  long  before  the  days  of 
Abraham  and  attained  their  greatest  prosperity  in  the  days  of 
Solomon,  when  his  fleets  and  those  of  his  friend  Hiram,  King  of 
Tyre,  controlled  and  monopolized  the  commerce  of  the  world. 
More  than  five  hundred  years  before  this  alliance,  however,  they 
had  established  commercial  relations  with  all  the  countries  bor- 
dering on  the  Mediterranean,  and  their  ships  were  trading  in  the 
ports  of  every  country  from  Egypt  to  the  Pillars  of  Hercules  and 
far  beyond.  There  seems  to  be  no  doubt  that  they  carried  tin 
from  Britain  and  amber  from  the  Baltic,  and,  of  course,  they 
had  to  bring  something  to  exchange  for  what  they  carried  away. 
What  did  they  bring?  As  amber  did  not  enter  into  the  necessary 
arts  it  is  not  probable  the  trade  was  very  large,  but  tin  was  re- 
quired by  many  nations  in  their  everyday  life,  especially  the 
Egyptians,  who  had  no  foreign  commerce  and  were  thus  depend- 
ent upon  the  Phoenician  merchants.  We  may  conclude,  there- 
fore, that  the  trade  in  tin  was  large,  and  as  there  was  no  Phoeni- 
cian colony  in  extreme  southwestern  Britain,  the  foreign  traders 
would  bring  just  what  the  Britons  most  needed.  If  they  were 
already  in  possession  of  horses  they  would  not  need  that  kind  of 
exchange,  but  if  they  were  not  in  possession  of  horses,  that  would 
be  just  the  kind  of  exchange  they  would  want,  and  probably  this 
was  the  source  from  which  they  obtained  their  supply.  The 
question,  however,  of  how  or  when  our  British  ancestors  obtained 
their  first  supply  of  horses  has  never  been  positively  answered. 
That  they  had  them  in  great  abundance  at  the  beginning  of  the 
Christian  era  is  fully  established  by  the  experience  of  the  Romans 
when  they  captured  Britain.  From  their  great  numbers  and  the 
skill  displayed  in  their  management  in  battle,  it  cannot  be 
doubted  that  they  were  there  for  many  generations  before  the 
Roman  armies  came  in  contact  with  them.  Many  theories  have 
been  advanced  as  to  how  the  horse  may  have  reached  Britain,  but 
no  one  of  them  rests  on  so  reasonable  a  basis  of  probability  as 
that  of  the  Phoenician  traders.  If  from  this  source,  which  I  am 
strongly  disposed  to  believe  was  the  true  source,  it  must  have 
been  during  the  maritime  supremacy  of  the  Phoenicians  and  their 
colonies,  and  this  would  place  the  date  several  centuries  before 


EARLY   DISTRIBUTION"    OF    HORSES.  49 

the  Christian  era.  If  we  were  able  to  reconstruct  the  original 
line  of  the  migration  of  the  early  English  horses,  we  would,  prob- 
ably.  first  find  them  in  "the  land  of  Togarmah"  starting  to 
market  at  Tyre,  where  they  were  exchanged  for  supplies  needed 
in  Armenia.  There  they  were  put  on  board  one  of  the  great 
"ships  of  Tarshish,"  and  when  they  next  touched  the  land  it  was 
at  one  of  the  ports  at  the  southwestern  portion  of  England,  where 
they  were  exchanged  for  tin  and  other  products  of  the  mines. 

In  addition  to  the  argument  furnished  by  this  known  course  of 
trade  between  nations  and  peoples,  in  prehistoric  times,  we  have 
an  additional  one  in  the  natural  perpetuation  of  racial  qualities, 
extending  through  many  centuries.  In  reply  to  some  questions 
submitted  to  a  friend  of  mine  who  was  born  in  Western  Persia, 
educated  in  this  country,  and  then  returned  to  the  land  of  his 
nativity,  I  have  replies  to  my  questions  bearing  date  of  July, 
1896.  He  is  located  at  Oroomiah,  not  far  from  the  modern  line 
between  Persia  and  Turkey,  and  in  what  may  be  considered  the 
very  center  of  ancient  Armenia.  He  is  not  skilled  in  horse  lore, 
but  he  uses  horses  a  great  deal  and  is  a  very  intelligent  observer. 
He  says  that  the  Persian  horses  have  been  greatly  overrated  and 
that  the  country  is  full  of  very  ordinary  horses.  He  says  that 
they  are  all  colors,  with  bays  probably  predominating.  There  is 
a  great  variety  of  mixed  greys,  shading  into  white,  and  a  few  that 
are  dappled.  Then  there  are  chestnuts,  sorrels,  "mouse-color" 
(duns),  and  not  many  blacks.  They  are  small,  as  a  rule,  and  a 
harness  of  small  size  from  this  country  has  to  be  cut  down  for 
them.  From  this  I  infer  that  they  are  generally  under  fourteen 
hands.  On  the  whole  the  horses  are  nicely  shaped,  have  slender, 
clean  limbs,  small  ears,  and  carry  the  head  and  tail  well  up.  As  a 
rule  they  are  great  stumblers.  With  regard  to  gaits  he  says  that 
stress  is  laid  on  a  rapid  walk — a  half  walk  and  half  trot.  In  this 
country  we  would  call  it  the  "running  walk"  that  may  be  kept 
up  for  days  in  succession.  In  speaking  of  the  pace,  my  corre- 
spondent says:  "There  are  some  horses  trained  to  pace,  while 
some  pick  it  up  naturally,  that  is,  are  born  pacers.  The  greater 
number  are  natural  pacers.  Now  and  then  one  will  find  a  rapid 
pacer,  but  commonly  the  pace  is  a  five  or  six  miles  an  hour  gait. 
There  are  some  that  single-foot  naturally,  and  from  birth." 

He  then  says  horses  are  not  bred  with  any  care.  They  are  turned 
loose  in  herds  and  the  breeding  is  such  as  would  naturally  occur. 

It  will  be  observed  that  my  Persian  friend  speaks  of  the  differ- 


50  THE    HOUSE    OF    AMERICA. 

ent  colors  "of  grey,  shading  into  white/'  which  suggests  a  possi- 
ble descent  from  the  famous  breed  of  white  Nissaean  horses  kept, 
by  the  great  Darius  and  other  Medo-Persian  monarchs  for  racing 
purposes.  But  the  striking  feature  in  this  description  of  the 
horses  of  Persia,  or  more  properly,  of  ancient  Armenia,  of  this 
day,  is  the  fact  that  they  are  of  the  same  size  and  color  and 
habits  of  action  as  the  horses  of  Britain  when  first  visited  by  the 
Eomans,  as  well  as  when  they  were  more  minutely  described 
twelve  hundred  years  later,  and  as  they  were  at  the  beginning  of 
the  seventeenth  century,  and  as  they  still  were  at  the  middle  of 
the  eighteenth  century.  As  evidence  on  these  points  reference 
is  made  to  the  chapters  on  horses  of  the  colonial  period  that  will 
follow  in  their  place.  In  ancient  Armenia,  as  with  all  pastoral 
people  of  the  early  ages,  horses  were  turned  out  to  run  in  herds 
and  literally  left  to  Mr.  Darwin's  law  of  "natural  selection  and 
the  survival  of  the  fittest."  So  it  was  in  Britain  to  a  great  ex- 
tent, until  the  eighteenth  century,  and  so  it  was  in  the  American 
colonies  until  fifty  years  later;  hence  the  same  types  and  charac- 
teristics prevailed  and  were  perpetuated  in  all  these  countries. 

It  is  sad  to  contemplate  the  present  debased  and  semi-barbarous 
condition  of  the  descendants  of  a  great  people  who  for  centuries 
stood  first  among  all  the  nations  of  the  earth  in  commercial  en- 
terprise, in  learning,  and  in  the  arts.  The  banishment  of  the 
Saracens  from  Spain  in  the  beginning  of  the  seventeenth  century 
of  our  era  was  in  fact  the  banishment  of  the  descendants  of  the 
Phoenicians  who  first  colonized  Spain.  The  architectural  struc- 
tures which  they  left  behind  them,  and  which  for  their  marvelous 
beauty  have  challenged  the  admiration  of  the  world,  were  not 
the  work  of  nomads  and  barbarians.  They  were  the  flashes  of 
the  old  Phoenician  taste  and  genius  as  exemplified  by  the  de- 
scendants of  the  men  whom  Hiram  sent  to  construct  and  decorate 
the  buildings  of  Solomon.  The  Alhambra  and  some  other  struc- 
tures in  Spain  are  all  that  we  have  to  remind  us  of  the  genius 
and  grandeur  of  Phoenicia.  Whatever  may  have  been  the  char- 
acter and  attainments  of  the  descendants  of  the  colonists  at  the 
time,  the  change  from  idolatry  to  Islamism  was  a  bad  one. 
Wherever,  throughout  the  world,  the  teachings  of  the  "Prophet" 
have  been  accepted,  whole  nations  have  become  intolerant,  mur- 
derous and  brutalized,  and  the  modern  Phoenicians  are  no  excep- 
tion. They  have  now  lost  their  identity  in  the  follies  and  crimes, 
of  Islamism  and  we  can  have  no  sympathy  for  them. 


CHAPTER    IV. 

THE   ARABIAN"   HORSE. 

The  Arabian,  the  horse  of  romance — The  horse  naturally  foreign  to  Arabia — 
Superiority  of  the  camel  for  all  Arabian  needs — Scarcity  of  horses  in  Arabia 
in  Mohammed's  time — Various  preposterous  traditious  of  Arab  horseman- 
ship— The  Prophet's  mythical  mares — Mohammed  not  in  any  sense  a 
horseman — Early  English  Arabians — the  Markham  Arabian — The  alleged 
Royal  Mares — The  Darley  Arabian —  The  Godolphin  Arabian — The  Prince 
of  Wales'  Arabian  race  horses — Mr.  Blunt's  pilgrimage  to  the  Euphrates — 
His  purchases  of  so-called  Arabians — Deyr  as  a  great  horse  market  where 
everything  is  thoroughbred — Failure  of  Mr.  Blunt's  experiments — Various 
Arabian  horses  brought  to  America — Horses  sent  to  our  Presidents — Dis- 
astrous experiments  of  A.  Keene  Richards — Tendency  of  Arab  romancing 
from  Ben  Hur. 

ADMIRATION  always  leads  to  exaggeration.  This  is  true  in 
most  of  the  relations  of  life,  but  in  our  admiration  of  the  horse  it 
becomes  greatly  intensified,  so  greatly  indeed  that  in  magnifying 
his  excellent  qualities  we  find  ourselves  telling  downright  false- 
hoods about  him  before  we  know  it.  This  "amiable  weakness," 
as  we  might  call  it,  is  true  of  our  everyday  life  and  our  everyday 
horses;  but  when  we  come  to  the  horse  that  is  the  universal  ideal 
of  perfection,  everybody  seems  to  lay  aside  all  the  restraints  of 
truth  in  extolling  the  superiority  of  his  qualities.  The  "Arabian 
horse"  is  the  ideal  horse  of  all  the  world.  He  is  the  "gold 
standard"  in  all  horsedom,  with  the  one  important  distinction 
that  the  one  is  real  and  the  other  is  mythical.  Not  one  so-called 
horseman  in  a  million  ever  saw  a  genuine  Arabian  horse,  nor  any 
of  the  descendants  of  one;  and  in  all  the  discussions  of  the  past 
three  hundred  and  fifty  years  it  has  never  been  shown  in  a  single 
instance  that  a  horse  from  Arabia,  with  an  authenticated  pedi- 
gree and  tracing  as  such,  has  ever  been  of  any  value,  either  as  a 
race  horse  or  as  a  progenitor  of  race  horses.  The  superior  quali- 
ties of  "the  Arabian  horse,"  like  the  superior  qualities  of  "The 
Arabian  Nights,"  are  purely  works  of  the  imagination.  There 
is  just  as  much  truth  in  the  stories  of  Sindbad  the  Sailor  and 


52  THE    HOKSE    OF    AMERICA. 

Aladdin's  Lamp  as  there  is  in  most  of  the  literature  relating  to 
the  Arabian  horse. 

I  am  fully  satisfied  that  these  views  of  the  Arabian  horse  will 
not  meet  with  a  ready  acceptance  by  the  vast  majority  of  the 
horsemen  of  this  or  any  other  country,  but  my  reasons  for  pre- 
senting them  will  become  apparent  as  the  discussion  progresses. 
They  smash  too  many  idols  and  dispel  too  many  chimeras  of  the 
brain  to  be  readily  accepted.  It  takes  the  average  man  a  long 
time  to  get  clear  of  the  prejudices  in  which  he  was  born,  and  the 
first  question  that  will  be  asked  by  the  doubter  is,  "Why  could 
not  Arabia  have  supported  a  race  of  indigenous  wild  horses,  as 
well  as  any  other  country?"  Because  the  horse,  wild  or  tame, 
has  never  learned  to  dig  a  well  forty  feet  deep,  nor  to  draw  water 
after  it  is  dug.  Neither  has  he  learned  to  lay  up  a  store  in  time 
of  plenty  against  a  time  of  famine.  The  horse  could  not  live  in 
Arabia  without  the  care  of  man.  And,  second,  "Why  were  all  the 
civilized  and  semi-civilized  nations  west  of  Asia  supplied  with 
horses  a  thousand  years  before  Arabia,  when  so  near  the  original 
habitat  of  the  horse?"  It  is  the  first  law  of  our  nature  to  supply 
ourselves  with  what  we  need.  The  camel  always  has  been  a 
necessity  to  the  Arab,  not  only  to  carry  him  and  his  burdens,  but 
to  furnish  nourishment  and  sustenance  to  him  and  his  family. 
The  camel  is  adapted  to  the  country  and  the  country  to  the 
camel,  and  no  other  created  animal  can  fill  that  place.  He  is, 
literally,  "the  ship  of  the  desert."  The  horse  in  Arabia  is  a 
luxury  that  can  be  indulged  in  only  by  the  rich;  hence  his  owner- 
ship is  practically  restricted  to  the  chiefs  of  tribes.  He  is  never 
used  except  for  display  and  war.  Palgrave,  in  speaking  specially 
of  the  Nejd  tribe,  says:  "A  horse  is  by  no  means  an  article  of 
everyday  possession,  or  of  ordinary  or  working  use.  No  genuine 
Arab  would  ever  dream  of  mounting  his  horse  for  a  mere  peace- 
ful journey,  whether  for  a  short  or  a  long  distance." 

When  we  consider  the  immeasurable  superiority  of  the  camel 
to  the  horse  in  meeting  the  wants  and  necessities  of  the  Arab, 
we  will  not  be  surprised  at  the  immense  herds  of  the  former  and 
the  small  numbers  of  the  latter  that  are  bred  and  reared  in  that 
country.  A  camel  can  go  four  days  without  water,  and  under 
stress,  it  is  said,  a  good  one  can  cover  the  distance  of  two  hun- 
dred miles  in  twenty-four  hours.  The  camel  and  the  country 
are  suited  to  each  other,  while  the  horse  is  an  exotic,  and  has  no 
part  in  any  industrial  interest  except  raiding  and  robbery.  My 


THE    ARABIAN    HORSE.  53 

attention  was  first  called  to  this  unexpected  smallness  in  the 
numbers  of  Arabian  horses  in  the  seventh  century,  two  hundred 
and  sixty  years  after  the  introduction  of  the  original  stock  from 
Cappadocia.  The  flight  of  Mohammed  from  his  enemies  in 
Mecca  to  Medina  took  place  A.D.  622.  There,  setting  up  as  a 
Prophet,  and  as  holding  communications  with  Heaven,  he  soon 
gathered  around  him  a  number  who  believed  in  his  divine  in- 
spiration. Understanding  the  habits  and  instincts  of  his  follow- 
ers, he  soon  found  he  must  give  them  something  to  do.  He 
called  them  about  him,  mounted  a  camel,  and  at  their  head  he 
was  successful  in  plundering  two  or  three  caravans,  which  greatly 
enraged  his  old  enemies  at  Mecca.  Whether  the  anger  of  his 
enemies  was  kindled  anew  because  some  of  the  plunder  belonged 
in  Mecca,  or  whether  he  merely  deprived  the  Meccans  of  the  op- 
portunity of  doing  the  plundering  themselves,  the  historian  fails 
to  make  clear.  Whichever  may  have  been  the  underlying  reason, 
it  led  to  war.  In  the  first  campaign  of  the  Meccans  and  in  the 
first  battle  fought,  they  far  outnumbered  the  followers  of  the 
Prophet.  There  were  some  camels  in  Mohammed's  train,  but  no 
horses.  He  did  not  lead  the  battle  himself,  but  remained  in  his 
tent  and  promised  his  followers  that  all  who  fell  in  battle  would 
be  forthwith  admitted  into  Paradise.  They  believed  the  promise, 
as  millions  and  millions  have  believed  it  since;  it  inspired  them, 
with  a  recklessness  of  life,  and  they  were  completely  victorious. 
The  result  of  this  victory  was  the  capture  of  one  hundred  and 
fifteen  camels  and  fourteen  horses,  besides  the  entire  camp  of  the 
enemy.  In  the  battle  of  the  next  year  (A.  D.  625)  between  the 
same  parties,  the  forces  were  much  increased  on  both  sides.  Sir 
William  Muir,  the  historian,  informs  us  that  Mohammed  had  but 
two  horses  in  his  army,  one  of  which  he  mounted  himself  and 
took  command  of  his  forces.  This  battle  was  not  decisive.  In 
subsequent  raids  he  captured  many  enemies  and  traded  his  female 
captives  for  horses  with  the  surrounding  tribes,  so  far  as  he  was 
able  to  obtain  them.  The  next  year  he  had  an  army  of  three 
thousand  men  and  thirty-six  horses,  while  the  enemy  had  an 
army  of  three  thousand  men,  of  whom  two  hundred  were  cavalry, 
but  there  was  no  fighting.  The  fame  of  Mohammed  as  a  suc- 
cessful and  relentless  pillager  and  destroyer  had  now  spread  far 
and  wide,  and  as  a  means  of  escape  the  chiefs  of  the  larger  por- 
tion of  the  tribes  of  Arabia  hastened  to  tender  their  allegiance 
and  obey  his  commands.  From  this  forward,  therefore,  we  must 


.54  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

consider  Mohammed  as  the  representative  of  the  whole  of  Arabia, 
in  both  its  religious  and  military  power.  The  next  year  his  old 
enemies,  the  citizens  of  Mecca,  surrendered  the  sacred  city  to 
him  without  a  blow,  and  thus  Islamism  became  a  mighty  power 
in  the  world. 

It  is  evident  from  many  sources  other  than  the  history  of 
Mohammed  that  horses  have  always  been  a  very  sparse  produc- 
tion in  Arabia.  Burckhardt,  the  famous  traveler  in  the  East, 
journeyed  very  extensively  in  Arabia  about  1814,  and  he  gives 
the  result  of  his  observations  on  this  point  of  numbers  as  follows: 
"In  all  the  journey  from  Mecca  to  Medina,  between  the  moun- 
tains and  the  sea,  a  distance  of  at  least  two  hundred  and  sixty 
miles,  I  do  not  believe  that  two  hundred  horses  could  be  found, 
.and  the  same  proportion  of  numbers  may  be  remarked  all  along 
the  Red  Sea."  This  is  in  strict  conformity  with  the  observations 
of  other  writers,  the  reasons  for  which  have  already  been  given. 

Time  out  of  mind,  everybody  has  heard  of  the  insuperable 
difficulty  of  prevailing  upon  an  Arab  to  part  with  his  genuine, 
high-caste  mare  for  either  love  or  money.  He  will  expatiate,  as 
the  story  goes,  upon  "the  beauty  and  graces  of  his  mare  as  the 
light  of  his  household  and  the  joy  and  playmate  of  his  children, 
and  above  all  as  she  is  royally  bred  he  cannot,  as  a  good  Moslem, 
disobey  the  injunctions  of  the  Prophet  not  to  sell  such  mares,  but 
to  keep  them  forever  that  their  descendants  may  enrich  the 
children  of  the  faithful  to  all  generations."  If  you  ask  him 
more  particularly  about  her  lines  of  descent,  he  will  give  you  fifty 
or  a  hundred  generations  and  land  you  safely  on  the  name  of  the 
particular  one  of  the  five  mares  of  the  Prophet  from  which  she  is 
descended.  To  illustrate  the  sham  of  all  this  Major  Upton's  ex- 
perience, in  purchasing  horses  in  Arabia  for  the  East  India 
service,  may  be  cited.  It  is  evident  the  major  understands  his 
dealers  and  they  understand  him.  He  says:  "In  the  desert  we 
never  heard  of  Mohammed's  mares,  nor  was  his  name  ever  men- 
tioned in  any  way  as  connected  with  the  Arabian  horse."  He 
says  there  is  no  restriction  nor  difficulty  in  buying  as  many  mares 
as  you  want,  in  any  part  of  Arabia.  This  disposes  of  the  tricky 
pretenses  of  the  Arab  horse  dealer  when  he  is  negotiating  a  sale 
to  a  man  without  Arabian  experience. 

Some  modern  writers  make  mention  of  a  tradition  that  still 
prevails  among  some  tribes  as  to  the  origin  of  the  Arabian  horse, 
;and  it  is  to  the  effect  that  their  best  horses  came  originally  from 


THE  AEABIAN   HORSE.  55 

Yemen.  This  tradition  is  met  with  in  Arabia  Deserta,  a  long 
way  from  Arabia  Felix,  of  which  Yemen  is  a  portion.  While 
this  tradition  is  of  no  possible  value  as  evidence,  it  is  suggestive 
of  what  might  be  unearthed  in  that  strange  country.  The  people 
were  not  nomadic,  but  agricultural  and  commercial,  and  the  cities 
were  rich.  The  people  were  well  advanced  in  the  arts  and  com- 
forts of  civilized  life,  and  in  their  cities  they  had  many  beautiful 
temples  and  palaces.  Such  a  people  would  of  necessity  produce 
learned  men  who  would  leave  records  of  their  national  history 
behind  them,  and  especially  that  of  such  an  event  as  the  conver- 
'.sion  of  the  whole  people  to  Christianity.  Possibly  the  researches 
of  scholarly  men  may  yet  bring  to  light  more  of  the  facts  con- 
nected with  the  embassy  from  the  Emperor  Constantius  and 
the  introduction  of  the  Cappadocian  horses  into  Yemen,  as  re- 
lated in  the  preceding  chapters. 

There  are  many  other  traditions,  so  called,  that  are  burnished 
up  and  brought  out  whenever  the  crafty  dealer  finds  he  has  a 
Richards  from  America,  or  a  Blunt  from  England,  with  his  mind 
already  made  up  that  all  the  best  horses  of  the  world  have  come 
from  Arabia.  To  such  a  customer,  with  his  mind  already  .at  high 
tension  in  search  for  the  longest  pedigree  and  the  purest  blood, 
the  dealer  casts  his  hook  in  something  like  the  form  following: 

"When  King  Solomon  had  completed  the  temple  he  turned  his 
attention  to  supplying  his  army  with  horses  and  chariots.  He 
searched  every  nation  that  had  horses  for  sale  and  would  have 
none  but  the  very  best  that  the  world  could  produce.  He  spent 
much  of  his  time  in  admiring  his  beautiful  horses,  and  one  day 
he  was  so  thoroughly  absorbed  that  the  hour  of  prayer  passed 
without  his  observing  it.  He  felt  that  this  neglect  to  pray  at  the 
proper  time  was  a  great  sin,  and  that  his  horses  had  led  him  into 
it.  He  did  not  hesitate  longer,  but  he  at  once  ordered  all  his 
horses  to  be  turned  loose  to  the  public.  -Some  of  my  ancestors 
succeeded  in  securing  six  of  these  mares,  and  from  these  six 
mares  all  the  good  horses  of  Arabia  are  descended." 

Other  dealers  are  a  little  more  modest  in  their  claims  for  the 
antiquity  of  the  pedigrees  of  their  horses,  and  generously  knock 
off  about  sixteen  hundred  years,  being  content  to  trace  to  the 
mares  of  the  Prophet  instead  of  the  mares  of  Solomon.  This 
still  leaves  them  with  a  pedigree  only  about  twelve  hundred  years 
long,  which  beats  our  modern  romancers  in  making  stud  books. 
In  order  to  test  and  select  the  mares  that  were  worthy  of  becom- 


56  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

ing  the  dams  of  the  best  horses,  as  the  story  goes,  the  Prophet 
shut  up  a  herd  of  mares,  in  plain  sight  of  water,  and  kept  them 
there  till  they  were  almost  famished  with  thirst;  and  then  at  a 
signal  they  were  all  released  at  once,  and  when  rushing  headlong 
to  the  water  the  trumpet  sounds,  and  notwithstanding  their 
sufferings  they  turn  and  align  themselves  up  in  military  order. 
In  this  test  of  obedience  and  discipline,  it  is  said,  only  five  of  the 
mares  obeyed  the  signal  (some  say  only  three)  and  thus  the  mares 
that  obeyed,  notwithstanding  their  sufferings,  became  justly  en- 
titled to  the  distinctive  and  honored  name  of  "The  Prophet's- 
Mares."  Another  story  is  told  of  the  particular  markings  which, 
in  the  Prophet's  estimation,  indicated  the  best  horses.  By  one 
authority  he  always  selected  a  black  horse  with  a  white  "fore- 
head," and  some  white  mark  or  marks  on  his  upper  lip.  An- 
other authority  says  he  always  chose  a  bay  horse  with  a  bald  face 
and  four  white  legs,  and  so  we  might  go  on  till  we  had  embraced 
every  color  and  every  combination  of  marks,  and  we  would  then 
find  that  each  "authority"  had  a  horse  to  sell  corresponding  with 
the  Prophet's  preferences.  Now  the  fact  is  that  Mohammed  was 
neither  a  horseman  nor  a  horse  breeder,  and  the  whole  tenor  of 
history  goes  to  show  that  he  neither  knew  nor  cared  very  much 
about  horses.  In  his  first  pilgrimage  to  Mecca,  after  the  battles 
referred  to  above,  the  privilege  for  which  was  secured  by  negotia- 
tion, a  hundred  horsemen,  it  is  said,  were  started  and  kept  one 
day's  journey  in  advance  of  the  main  body  of  pilgrims.  The 
great  numbers  following  Mohammed  on  this  pilgrimage  admon- 
ished his  old  enemies  of  Mecca  of  the  futility  of  attempting  to 
resist  his  power  longer,  and  they  fled  from  the  city  during  the 
continuance  of  the  ceremonies.  A  year  or  two  later  he  sum- 
moned all  the  tribes  of  Northern  and  Eastern  Arabia  to  follow  him 
again  to  Mecca,  and  they  had  too  lively  a  sense  of  their  own  safety 
to  disobey.  Due  time  was  given  for  preparation,  the  rendezvous 
was  at  Medina,  and  a  vast  host  from  all  Northern  and  Western 
Arabia  congregated  there  for  a  purpose  that  might  be  to  fight, 
or  it  might  be  to  pray.  Mohammed  mounted  his  camel  and  the 
word  was  passed,  "On  to  Mecca."  As  against  such  a  multitude 
the  Meccans  saw  that  resistance  was  hopeless,  and  the  city  was 
surredenred  without  either  side  striking  a  blow.  Arrayed  in  great 
splendor  and  mounted  on  his  camel,  the  Prophet  made  the  req- 
uisite number  of  circuits  round  the  holy  place  and  then  entered 
and  ordered  all  the  idols  that  had  been  set  up  there  to  be  de- 


THE   AKABIAN   HOKSE.  57 

stroyed,  and  his  followers  then  shouted,  "Allah  is  Allah,  and 
Mohammed  is  his  Prophet!"  Thus  he  became  master  of  all 
Arabia — and  woe  to  the  Christian  or  the  Jew  who  stood  in  his 
way.  Two  years  afterward  he  died,  and  there  is  nothing  in  bis 
life  or  history  to  indicate  that  he  ever  owned  a  horse  or  that  he 
ever  mounted  one,  except  on  a  single  occasion.  In  the  ten  short 
years  of  his  public  life  he  had  something  more  important  on  hand 
than  to  determine  how  to  breed  horses. 

In  studying  the  Arabian  horse  in  the  light  of  what  he  has  done 
and  what  he  has  failed  to  do,  we  are  indebted  to  English  writers 
for  little  snatches  of  experiences  extending  back  for  a  period  of 
about  two  hundred  and  fifty  years.  The  earliest  English  writer 
who  has  had  anything  to  say  about  the  Arabian  horse  was  the 
Duke  of  Newcastle,  who  seems  to  have  known  a  great  deal  about 
the  various  types  and  breeds  of  horses  of  his  day.  During  the 
period  of  the  Commonwealth  it  appears  he  devoted  his  time,  in 
the  Netherlands,  to  training  horses  in  the  manege  of  that  day. 
From  his  experience  in  this  employment  he  became  an  expert  in 
the  form,  structure,  and  docility  of  the  different  kinds  of  horses 
that  hie  handled.  When  Charles  II.  was  brought  back  and  placed 
upon  the  throne,  the  duke  also  came  to  his  own,  and  being  a 
personal  friend  of  the  king  he  became  his  counselor  and  adviser 
in  all  matters  relating  to  the  improvement  of  the  horses  of  the 
realm.  In  1667  the  duke  published  his  famous  book  upon  the 
horse,  in  which  he  speaks  right  out  on  any  and  every  question  that 
he  touches.  There  can  be  no  doubt  that  he  knew  more  about 
horses  and  horse  history  than  any  man  of  his  day.  In  speaking 
of  the  Arabian  horse  he  says:  "I  never  saw  but  one  of  these 
horses,  which  Mr.  John  Markham,  a  merchant,  brought  over,  and 
said  he  was  a  right  Arabian.  He  was  a  bay,  but  a  little  horse, 
and  no  rarity  for  shape,  for  I  have  seen  many  English  horses  far 
finer.  Mr.  Markham  sold  him  to  King  James  for  five  hundred 
pounds,  and  being  trained  up  for  a  course  (race),  when  he  came 
to  run  every  horse  beat  him." 

It  is  generally  held  that  this  Markham  Arabian  was  the  first  of 
that  breed  ever  brought  to  England,  and  this  seems  to  be  estab- 
lished by  the  fact  that  historians  antedating  his  arrival  make  no 
mention  of  any  Arabian  horse  before  this  one,  and  those  follow- 
ing always  speak  of  this  horse  as  the  first.  In  speaking  of  the 
powers  of  endurance  of  the  Arabian  horse,  the  duke  says:  "They 
talk  they  will  ride  fourscore  miles  in  a  day  and  never  draw  the 


58  THE   HOESE   OF   AMERICA. 

bridle.  When  I  was  young  I  could  have  bought  a  nag  for  ten 
pounds  that  would  have  done  as  much  very  easily."  The  duke's 
masterful  knowledge  of  the  subject,  as  well  as  his  special  oflicial 
relations  to  the  king,  gave  him  control  of  whatever  was  done  or 
attempted  in  the  direction  of  improving  the  racing  stock  of  Eng- 
land. Tradition  informs  us  that  "King  Charles  II.  sent  abroad 
the  master  of  the  horse  to  procure  a  number  of  foreign  horses 
and  mares  for  breeding,  and  the  mares  brought  over  by  him  (as  also 
many  of  their  produce)  have  since  been  called  Eoyal  Mares.7' 
It  is  very  doubtful  whether  any  such  importation  was  ever  made. 
The  question  has  been  discussed,  from  time  to  time  and  even 
recently,  but  nobody  has  ever  yet  discovered  who  was  "Master  of 
the  Horse,"  to  what  country  he  was  sent  or  what  the  character  of 
the  mares  he  brought  home,  or  where  he  got  them.  The  fair 
presumption  is  that  these  "Eoyal  Mares"  were  myths  and  that 
they  were  created  merely  for  the  purpose  of  putting  a  finish  on 
certain  very  uncertain  pedigrees,  just  as  a  trotting-horse  man 
would  finish  a  pedigree  that  he  knew  nothing  about  by  saying, 
"out  of  a  thoroughbred  mare*"  As  a  matter  of  course  it  ha& 
always  been  assumed  that  these  "Royal  Mares"  were  of  distinc- 
tively pure  Arabian  blood.  But,  if  we  admit  that  such  an  im- 
portation was  really  made,  we  must  consider  that  it  was  made 
under  the  direction  and  control  of  the  Duke  of  Newcastle,  the 
king's  mentor  in  all  horse  affairs,  and  this  is  sufficient  proof  that 
there  was  no  Arabian  blood  about  the  "Royal  Mares."  As  the 
size  of  the  English  race  horse  and  especially  his  weight  of  bone 
commenced  to  increase  soon  after  this  time,  it  strikes  me  as 
probable  that  this  was  the  wise  and  guiding  motive  of  the  duke  in 
making  his  selections  of  the  "Royal  Mares." 

When  we  come  down  a  little  nearer  to  our  own  times  and  step 
across  the  border  from  the  seventeenth  to  the  eighteenth  century, 
we  are  still  in  the  realm  of  traditions,  and  many  of  them  very 
preposterous.  The  deceptions  practiced  in  nomenclature  were  so 
common  as  to  be  well-nigh  universal.  Everybody  who  owned  a 
foreign  horse  must  have  "Arabian"  attached  to  his  name.  To- 
illustrate  this  evil  and  the  misleading  effects  flowing  from  it,  I 
will  give  two  instances  of  the  most  famous  horses  in  all  English 
history.  The  Darley  Arabian  and  the  Godolphin  Arabian  stand 
pre-eminent  and  before  all  others  as  progenitors  of  the  English 
race  horse.  The  former  of  these  two  was  purchased  at  Aleppo, 
in  Asia  Minor,  and  brought'to  England  in  1711,  by  Mr.  Darley  of 


THE   ARABIAN   HORSE.  59 

Yorkshire  who  secured  him  through  a  brother  in  trade  in  that 
region.  He  was  the  sire  of  Flying  Childers  and  many  others, 
and  his  blood  carried  from  generation  to  generation.  Aleppo  is 
in  Northern  Syria  and  far  distant  from  Arabia.  At  one  time  it 
was  embraced  in  Armenia  Minor,  the  original  home  of  the  horse, 
and  adjoined  Cappadocia  and  Cilicia,  all  famous  for  the  excel- 
lence of  their  horse  stock  more  than  two  thousand  years  before 
there  was  a  single  horse  in  Arabia.  Upon  the  restoration  of  the 
ancient  Theban  line  of  Pharaohs  in  Egypt,  at  the  beginning  of 
the  eighteenth  dynasty,  no  time  was  lost  by  Thutmosis  I.  in  lead- 
ing a  great  army  into  Northern  Syria  for  no  other  purpose  that  is 
apparent  except  to  replenish  and  rjeinvigorate  the  horse  stock  of 
Egypt,  from  the  region  of  Aleppo  and  further  east,  for  this  is 
the  region  from  which  they  had  secured  their  original  stock. 
His  successors  pursued  the  same  course,  year  after  year,  and  the 
number  of  horses  and  chariots  captured  in  battle,  as  well  as  the 
number  of  mares  sent  as  tribute  by  the  frightened  people,  were 
duly  recorded  in  the  annals  of  their  achievements.  If  the 
Darley  Arabian,  so  called,  bore  any  relationship  whatever  to  the 
Arabian  horse,  it  can  only  be  established  by  tracing  him  back  to 
some  one  of  the  animals  in  Cappadocia  that  the  Emperor  Con- 
stantius  sent  to  Arabia  in  the  year  A.D.  356.  A  writer  of  the 
seventeenth  century,  Dr.  Alexander  Bursell,  in  speaking  of  Aleppo, 
says:  "Formerly  this  part  of  the  country  was  famous  for  fine 
horses;  and  though  many  good  ones  are  still  bred  here,  it  may 
be  said  they  are  much  degenerated."  This  is  the  observation  of 
an  intelligent  man,'  written  and  published  in  1756,  about  forty- 
years  after  Mr.  Parley's  horse  was  brought  from  there. 

The  other  illustration  is  that  of  Godolphin  Arabian.  As  a  pro- 
genitor of  race  horses  this  was  the  greatest  horse  of  his  century,  or 
indeed  of  any  other  century  in  the  history  of  the  English  race 
horse.  He  died  in  1753,  and  absolutely  nothing  is  known  of  his 
origin  or  his  early  history.  The  story  is  generally  accepted,  and 
I  suppose  is  true,  that  he  was  bought  out  of  a  cart  in  Paris,  as  an 
act  of  humanity,  by  a  Mr.  Coke,  taken  to  London,  presented  ta 
Mr.  Williams,  the  keeper  of  a  coffee-house,  and  passed  from  him 
to  Lord  Godolphin,  who  kept  him  till  he  died.  The  story  that 
he  was  presented  to  Louis  XV.  by  the  Bey  of  Tunis  in  1731  has 
never  been  verified  in  any  manner,  and  breaks  down  on  the  vital 
point  of  date.  Some  intelligent  Englishmen  Insist  that  he  must 
have  been  an  Arabian,  while  others  insist  that  he  must  have  been  a- 


•60  THE   HORSE   OF   AMEEICA. 

Barb,  while  no  man  knows  whether  he  was  either  one  or  the 
other.  With  the  most  prominent  horses  of  the  nation  and  of 
their  century  thus  used  to  mislead  the  public  mind  as  to  their 
lineage,  what  are  we  to  expect  from  the  great  ruck  of  the  obscure 
and  less  prominent?  But,  as  a  more  elaborate  and  methodical 
discussion  of  this  topic  will  be  found  in  the  chapter  on  the  Eng- 
lish and  American  Race  Horse,  we  will  now  turn  our  attention  to 
the  actual  experiences  with  the  Arabians  in  recent  times. 

When  we  come  down  to  the  present  century  we  get  into  the 
era  of  newspapers  that  really  begun  to  give  the  news,  and  thus 
educate  their  readers,  not  very  authentically,  but  circumstantially, 
in  what  was  passing  in  the  world  in  every  department  of  knowl- 
edge and  enterprise.  Under  these  wide  sources  of  information,  a 
few  authentic  experiences  will  serve  to  illustrate  the  true  status 
of  the  Arabian  horse  and  his  influence,  or  lack  of  influence,  on 
English  and  American  horses.  More  than  twenty  years  ago  the 
Prince  of  Wales  made  a  royal  progress  through  Her  Majesty's 
dominions  in  the  East.  The  enthusiasm  was  unbounded  and  he 
was  loaded  down  with  many  valuable  presents,  among  them 
several  elegant,  high-caste  Arabian  horses.  It  appears  that  some 
of  these  horses  had  already  won  reputation  and  money  on  the 
turf,  and  were  considered  the  very  best  that  could  be  found  in 
the  East.  On  their  arrival  they  were  greatly  admired  and  praised, 
especially  by  the  sporting  friends  of  the  prince,  who  seemed  to 
have  no  doubt,  nor  did  they  conceal  their  opinions,  that  they 
could  beat  any  horses  in  all  England.  This  was  a  conclusion 
that  a  great  many  racing  men,  with  longer  memories,  could  not 
accept,  and  after  a  good  deal  of  diplomacy  a  match  was  finally 
concluded  between  the  prince's  best  horse  and  an  old  horse  that 
was  third  or  fourth-class,  in  his  prime,  but  was  unsound  and 
liable  to  break  down  any  time  he  was  extended.  The  prince  was 
popular,  had  many  supporters,  and  much  money  was  pending. 
The  old  horse  was  patched  up  as  well  as  possible,  the  day  came, 
the  race  was  started,  and  the  old  cripple  was  so  much  faster  than 
the  Arab  that  his  managers  had  the  hardest  work  in  the  world  to 
prevent  him  from  running  clear  away  and  disgracing  the  prince. 
This  account  of  the  race  I  had  from  one  of  the  most  eminent  and 
successful  trainers  that  England  has  produced.  He  witnessed 
the  race  and  knew  all  the  facts  concerning  it.  Notwithstanding 
the  popularity  of  the  prince  and  the  universal  feeling  of  loyalty 
toward  him,  it  was  a  long  time  before  his  Arabs  ceased  to  be  a 
laughing-stock  among  horsemen. 


THE   ARABIAN   HORSE.  61. 

Some  sixteen  or  eighteen  years  ago,  an  English  gentleman  of 
wealth  and  intelligence — Mr.  Wilfrid  S.  Blunt — got  it  into  his 
head  that  the  way  to  improve  the  English  race  horse  was  to  se- 
cure fresh  infusions  of  pure  Arabian  blood.  He  was  industrious 
in  propagating  his  fad,  in  an  amateurish  way,  through  the  columns 
of  the  English  newspapers,  evincing  great  zeal  and  a  great  lack  of 
knowledge  of  the  hundreds  of  experiments  in  the  same  direction 
and  in  the  history  of  his  own  country  that  had  proved  disastrous. 
But  he  had  a  will  of  his  own  and  a  bank  account  that  enabled  him 
to  carry  out  his  views  to  their  own  realization.  In  the  autumn  of 
1877  he  made  up  a  pleasant  family  party,  consisting  of  his  wife, 
Lady  Anne,  and  two  of  her  lady  friends  and  started  for  Arabia,  with 
the  full  determination  to  find  the  best  and  to  buy  nothing  that 
was  not  of  the  purest  and  best  lineage  that  could  be  found  in  all 
that  country.  Fortunately,  Lady  Anne  carefully  noted  down 
everything  that  transpired  in  their  journeyings  and  after  the  re- 
turn wrote  a  very  pleasant  and  readable  book,  understood  to  have 
been  edited  by  her  husband  in  some  of  its  features.  The  title 
of  the  book — "The  Bedouin  Tribes  of  the  Euphrates" — did  not 
strike  me  pleasantly,  for  I  never  knew  that  any  of  the  numerous 
Bedouin  tribes  were  to  be  found  on  the  Euphrates.  But  my 
purpose  is  not  to  criticise  either  the  book  or  its  title,  but  to  fol- 
low the  party  over  its  itinerary  and  discover  just  where  Mr.  Blunt 
found  the  blood  he  was  looking  for,  and  upon  what  evidence  he 
accepted  it  as  "the  best  blood."  With  this  view  I  will  carefully 
give  his  own  language,  so  far  as  it  applies  to  the  point  in  view. 

His  first  purchase  was  at  Aleppo,  where  he  got  a  mare  he 
named  Hagar,  as  he  says,  "for  a  very  moderate  sum."  "She  was 
of  the  Kehilan-Ajuz  breed."  "When  purchased  she  was  in  very 
poor  condition,  having  just  gone  through  the  severe  training  of  a 
campaign."  "She  was  bred  by  the  Gommussa,  the  most  able  of 
the  horse-breeding  tribes,  had  passed  from  them  to  the  Roala, 
and  had  now  been  captured  and  ridden  some  two  hundred  miles, 
in  hot  haste,  for  sale  to  Aleppo."  "We  never  met  anything  in 
our  travels  that  could  compete  with  her  over  a  distance,  and  she 
has  often  run  down  foxes  and  even  hares,  without  assistance, 
carrying  thirteen  stone  on  her  back."  This  was  the  first  experi- 
ence of  the  English  "tenderfoot"  among  Syrian  horsethieves. 
According  to  his  own  showing,  he  bought  her  from  the  fellow 
who  had  stolen  her  and  had  ridden  her  two  hundred  miles  to 
escape,  and  he  accepted  what  the  thief  told  about  the  breeding  of 


62  THE    HOKSE    OF   AMEKICA. 

the  mare  as  true.  The  thief  knew  just  what  Mr.  Blunt  wanted 
and  he  shaped  the  pedigree  and  tracing  to  suit  the  purchaser. 
Mr.  Blunt  had  no  knowledge  of  this  mare's  breeding,  nor  where 
she  came  from;  still,  her  blood  was  to  become  one  of  the  great 
influences  in  renovating  the  English  race  horse.  This  incident  is 
of  no  importance,  in  itself,  except  as  it  illustrates  the  universal 
conditions  under  which  amateurs  buy  horses  in  the  Orient. 

Upon  leaving  Aleppo,  the  party  traveled  eastward  till  they 
struck  the  Euphrates  and  then  down  the  right  bank  of  that  river. 
The  first  town  of  any  importance  was  Deyr,  on  the  river,  and  just 
across  was  ancient  Mesopotamia.  They  were  still  in  the  border 
land  between  the  productive  north  and  the  desert  south,  with 
the  Syrian  desert  between  them  and  the  Arabian  desert.  All 
this  region  is  occupied  with  a  mixture  of  races,  employed  in 
varied  pursuits,  with  but  a  feeble  trace  of  tribal  authority,  as  all 
are  under  the  direct  government  of  the  Sultan  of  Turkey. 

"  Deyr  is  well-known,"  Mr.  Blunt  says,  "  as  a  horse  market,  and  is,  perhaps, 
the  only  town  north  of  the  Jebel  Shammar  where  the  inhabitants  have  any 
general  knowledge  of  the  blood  and  breeding  of  the  beasts  they  possess.  The 
townsmen,  indeed,  are  but  a  single  step  removed  from  the  Bedouins,  their  un- 
doubted ancestors.  They  usually  purchase  t  eir  colts  as  yearlings  either  from 
the  Gomussa,  or  some  of  the  Sabaa  tribes,  and  having  broken  them  thoroughly, 
sell  them  at  three  years  old  to  the  Aleppo  merchants.  They  occasionally,  too, 
have  mares  left  with  them,  in  partnership,  by  the  Anazah,  and  from  these  they 
breed  according  to  the  strictest  desert  rules.  It  is,  therefore,  for  a  stranger, 
by  far  the  best  market  for  thoroughbreds  in  Asia,  and  you  may  get  some  of 
the  best  blood  at  Deyr  that  can  be  found  anywhere,  besides  having  a 
guarantee  of  its  authenticity,  impossible,  under  ordinary  circumstances,  to  get 
at  Damascus  or  Aleppo.  There  are,  I  may  say,  no  horses  at  Deyr  but  thorough- 
breds " 

He  made  some  purchases  at  Deyr  and  then  they  pursued  their 
journey  down  the  river,  and  at  the  most  convenient  point  he 
crossed  over  to  Bagdad,  on  the  Tigris.  Here  he  inspected  the  stud 
of  the  Turkish  pasha,  but  the  prices  were  high  and  he  seemed  to 
lack  confidence  in  the  purity  of  their  breeding.  Whatever  the 
cause,  he  made  no  purchases,  and  soon  started  on  his  journey 
up  the  Tigris.  Upon  reaching  Sherghat  on  the  Tigris,  he  turned 
westward,  and  crossing  ancient  Mesopotamia,  he  was  again  at 
Deyr,  where  he  seems  to  have  made  more  purchases,  and  then 
started,  in  a  southwesterly  direction,  with  eighteen  mares  and  two 
stallions  for  Damascus  and  the  coast.  This  closed  the  search  of 
Arabia  for  Arabian  horses  of  the  highest  caste  and  purest  blood, 


THE   ARABIAN   HORSE.  63 

without  really  being  in  Arabia,  and  this  is  all  that  can  be  said  of 
"The  Bedouin  Tribes  of  the  Euphrates" — without  having  seen  a 
real  Bedouin. 

No  doubt  Mr.  Blunt  thinks  he  is  right  in  his  high  appreciation 
of  the  town  of  Deyr  as  a  horse  market;  that  it  is  "the  best 
market  for  thoroughbreds  in  Asia;7'  and  that  "there  are  no 
horses  in  Deyr  but  thoroughbreds,"  or  he  would  not  have  bought 
his  horses  there.  Dealing  in  horses  seems  to  be  the  principal 
business  of  the  people,  they  are  all  well  informed  on  the  best  and 
purest  strains  of  blood,  according  to  Mr.  Blunt,  and  all  their  own 
horses  are  thoroughbred.  Truly  an  ideal  market,  an  ideal  people, 
and  ideal  horses,  just  suited  to  the  needs  of  enthusiastic  amateurs 
like  Mr.  Blunt.  This  remarkable  horse  town  is  located  on  the 
border  between  the  rich  grain  fields  and  luxuriant  meadows  on  the 
north,  and  the  comparatively  barren  deserts  of  the  south.  On 
the  north  the  country  has  been  famous  for  thousands  of  years  for 
the  great  numbers  and  excellence  of  the  horses  produced,  and 
they  are  still  produced  of  excellent  form  and  quality,  and  are  sold 
at  very  low  prices.  On  the  south  is  the  land  of  the  camel,  and 
but  few  horses  and  those  few  held  at  high  prices,  and  the  simple 
term  "Arabian  horse"  always  brings  them  purchasers.  Here, 
then,  we  find  that  Deyr  is  the  very  paradise  of  horse  traders — a 
tribe,  wherever  we  find  them  on  the  face  of  the  earth,  distin- 
guished for  elasticity  of  conscience.  The  north  furnishes  the 
horses  and  the  south  furnishes  the  pedigrees,  and  no  wonder  the 
Deyrites  had  nothing  but  "thoroughbreds"  when  Mr.  Blunt  came 
along.  In  the  1'ne  of  their  business  and  from  their  southern 
neighbors,  they  had  picked  up  enough  "Arabian  horse  talk"  to 
satisfy  all  inexperienced  buyers  that  they  knew  all  about  the  value 
of  the  different  strains  of  Arabian  blood,  and  could  supply  them 
from  their  own  studs,  au  very  reasonable  prices.  And  thus  Mr. 
Blunt  brought  home  to  England  eighteen  "Arabian"  mares  and 
two  stallions,  without  any  satisfactory  evidence  that  they  ever 
had  seen  Arabia.  In  this  enthusiastic  venture,  resulting  in  utter 
failure,  there  is  one  alleviating  fact  that  Mr.  Blunt  can  call  to 
mind,  and  that  is  that  his  horses  were  just  as  good  for  the  pur- 
pose of  improving  the  English  race  horse  as  any  others  that 
have  been  brought  from  the  Orient  in  the  past  hundred  years. 
Whatever  their  blood,  whether  genuine  or  counterfeit  Arabians, 
they  have  all  alike  been  failures,  and  all  alike  good  for  nothing. 

Early  in  the  history  of  our  own  government  it  became  not  an 


64  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

unusual  thing  for  the  Sultan  of  Turkey,  the  Emperor  of  Morocco, 
or  some  other  potentate  of  the  Saracenic  races,  to  present  to  the 
President  two  horses,  and  as  they  were  presents  from  royalty  to 
what  they  esteemed  royalty,  they  were  necessarily  of  the  highest 
caste  and  of  the  greatest  value  of  any  horses  in  all  their  domin- 
ions. It  is  probable  that  Mr.  Jefferson  was  the  first  president  to 
receive  these  royal  gifts,  and  under  the  requirements  of  the  con- 
stitution and  without  any  disrespect  to  the  donor,  he  ordered 
them  to  be  sold  to  the  highest  bidder,  and  turned  the  money  into 
the  treasury.  Several  of  the  presidents  received  these  presents 
of  horses,  and  without  knowing  the  fact,  I  will  presume  disposed 
of  them  the  same  way.  In  the  case  of  President  Lincoln,  Mr. 
Seward  seemed  to  be  more  highly  favored  and  the  sultan  sent 
the  horses  to  him.  Through  the  State  Agricultural  Society,  Mr. 
Seward  presented  his  royal  presents  to  the  State  of  New  York. 
My  recollection  is  not  very  distinct,  but  my  impression  is  that 
Mr.  Van  Buren  had  disposed  of  his  in  the  same  way.  When 
General  Grant  received  his,  he  was  not  in  public  office  and  hence 
they  became  his  personal  property.  A  number  of  the  first  of 
these  importations,  together  with  some  others  that  were  brought 
from  Arabia,  individually  and  by  private  persons,  were,  in  the 
early  part  of  the  century,  carried  into  the  South,  which  was  then 
the  "race-horse  region,"  but  the  breeders  there  very  soon  dis- 
covered that  in  breeding  from  them  they  were  taking  a  backward 
instead  of  a  forward  step.  Their  progeny  could  neither  run  nor 
trot,  and  as  they  were  too  small  for  the  ordinary  uses  of  the 
farmer  and  planter,  they  were  almost  unanimously  rejected,  with 
nothing  left  but  the  ignorant  "fad"  that  was  embodied  in  the 
name  "Arabian." 

The  most  notable  example  of  the  folly  of  attempting  to  re- 
generate the  American  race  horse  by  the  introduction  of  the 
"blood  of  the  desert"  is  furnished  in  the  sad  experience  of  the 
late  A.  Keene  Richards,  of  Kentucky.  He  inherited  a  large 
estate,  and  when  he  came  into  possession  he  proved  himself  an 
intelligent  and  successful  breeder,  and  ran  the  colts  of  his  own 
breeding,  with  a  full  share  of  winnings.  He  was  not  a  spendthrift 
nor  a  gambler,  but  he  was  not  content  with  mediocrity  in  shar- 
ing triumphs  with  his  neighbors,  for  he  was  ambitious  to  beat 
them  all.  He  soon  had  his  head  full  of  such  horses  as  the  Parley 
Arabian  and  the  Godolphin  Arabian,  and  he  argued  if  that  blood 
founded  the  English  race  horse,  he  would  go  to  Arabia  and  get  it,, 


THE   ARABIAN   HORSE.  65 

and  it  could  not  fail  to  regenerate  the  American  race  horse.  He 
did  not  stop  to  inquire  whether  either  of  his  great  ideals  might 
have  had  a  drop  of  Arabian  blood  in  his  veins,  but  he  started  for 
Arabia  at  once.  He  brought  home  a  few  stallions  and  felt  sure 
he  was  on  the  eve  of  the  greatest  triumph  of  his  life.  When  the 
half-Arab  produce  of  his  strong  and  elegantly  bred  race  mares 
were  old  enough  to  run  the  jockey  club  allowed  the  half-breeds 
seven  pounds  the  advantage  in  weight  and  they  were  beaten. 
The  club  then  allowed  them  fourteen  pounds  and  they  were 
again  beaten;  and  finally  the  allowance  was  raised  to  twenty-one 
pounds,  and  they  were  still  in  the  rear  rank.  Under  these  hu- 
miliating defeats  a  careful  man  would  have  hesitated  before  he 
went  further,  but  he  at  once  jumped  to  the  conclusion  that  his 
defeat  was  not  in  the  fact  that  Arab  blood  could  not  run  fast 
enough  to  win,  but  in  the  fact,  as  he  supposed,  that  the  rascally 
Arabs  had  sold  him  blood  that  was  not  Arab  blood.  In  a  short 
time  he  was  off  for  Arabia  again,  taking  with  him  as  companion 
and  adviser  the  distinguished  animal  painter,  Troye,  who  had  a 
long  and  successful  experience  as  a  delineator  of  race  horses  and 
knew  all  about  the  anatomy  of  the  horse.  They  spent  several 
months  among  the  different  tribes,  and  in  order  to  get  "inside  of 
the  ring,"  as  it  were,  they  ate  with  the  Arabs,  slept  with  the 
Arabs,  and  worshiped  with  the  Arabs,  as  Mr.  Richards  told  me 
himself.  They  came  home  full  of  the  highest  expectations,  bring- 
ing several  mares  as  well  as  stallions  with  them,  and  fully  assured 
that  every  one  was  of  the  highest  caste  and  the  best  form  for  rac- 
ing that  could  be  found  on  all  the  plains  of  the  desert.  After 
the  foals  of  this  importation  were  old  enough  to  start  in  the 
stakes,  they  were  given  the  same  advantages  in  weight  as  before, 
and  they  proved  no  better  than  the  first  lot.  Poor  Mr.  Richards 
was  crushed  in  spirits,  not  only  by  the  vanishing  of  his  air  castles, 
but  by  the  importunacy  of  his  creditors.  In  his  heroic,  but  mis- 
guided, efforts  to  improve  the  American  race  horse  by  infusions 
of  pure  Arabian  blood,  he  involved  his  once  handsome  estate, 
and  he  died  hopelessly  insolvent.  He  had  bred  a  number  of  pure 
Arabs  of  several  generations,  but  the  abundant  feed  and  luxuriant 
blue  grass  of  Kentucky  did  not  increase  their  size,  for  when  they 
came  under  the  auctioneer's  hammer  they  were  but  little 
'  'tackeys,"  and  they  brought  only  the  price  of  little  "tackeys." 

The  number  of  horses  brought  to  this  country,  whether  as 
gifts  to  statesmen  or  as  private  ventures,  and  called  "Arabians," 


66  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

is  not  very  large,  and  it  is  safe  to  say  that  not  one  in  ten  of  them 
ever  saw  Arabia.  They  came  from  Turkey  or  some  of  the  Bar- 
bary  States.  But  in  the  case  of  Mr.  Eichards  there  can  be  no 
doubt  that  he  made  his  selections  in  Arabia  itself.  Those  selec- 
tions having  been  made  personally  and  with  care  and  skill,,  we  are 
bound  to  accept  them  as  genuine  Arabians.  When  we  find, 
therefore,  that  having  been  tested  they  are  no  better  than  the 
horses  brought  from  Turkey  or  from  Africa,  we  must  conclude 
that  the  whole  scheme  is  mere  moonshine,  and  that  Arabian 
blood  as  a  means  of  improvement  has  failed  to  develop  the  value 
that  enthusiasts  and  dreamers  have  claimed  for  it  since  ''time 
whereof  the  memory  of  man  runneth  not  to  the  contrary." 
Practical  and  thinking  men  always  judge  of  the  value  of  a  breed 
of  horses  from  what  the  representatives  of  that  breed  can  do  or  what 
they  fail  to  do.  The  emotional  and  unpractical  are  always  look- 
ing for  an  ideal  horse,  and  the  poets  and  story  writers  are  always 
furnishing  them  one.  Where  a  horse  figures  in  a  story  he  is 
uniformly  endowed  with  an  almost  supernatural  intelligence  and 
sense.  To  finish  up  the  ideal  horse,  he  always  traces  back  to  the 
"Courser  of  the  Desert."  If  his  triumph  is  in  a  flight  of  speed, 
he  distances  all  competitors  because  he  is  a  pure  Arabian.  The 
story  of  "Ben  Hur,"  written  by  General  Lew  Wallace,  furnishes  a 
fitting  illustration  of  this  tendency  of  the  public  mind.  The  story 
of  the  chariot  race  at  Antioch  is  a  masterpiece  of  most  exciting 
ingenuity,  and  one  of  the  finest  specimens  of  word  painting  in 
the  English  language.  The  irascible  old  sheik  is  quite  over- 
drawn, but  the  judgment  and  skill  of  Ben  Hur  cannot  be  sur- 
passed. As  a  matter  of  course,  the  team  of  black  Arabians  was 
bound  to  win.  Every  bright  schoolboy  in  the  country  has  read 
the  story,  and  he  has  joined  in  the  triumph  of  the  black  Arabians. 
The  wide  interest  in  the  chariot  race  seemed  to  demand  its  pic- 
torial delineation,  and  soon  the  public  was  gratified  with  a  large 
and  elegant  etching,  which  hangs  before  me  as  I  write.  The  only 
trouble  about  this  excellent  work  of  the  imagination  and  the 
team  of  black  Arabians  is  that  there  were  no  horses  in  Arabia  till 
about  .three  hundred  and  fifty  years  after  the  date  of  this  sup- 
posed scene.  We  must  let  the  poets  sing  and  the  novelists  work 
out  their  plots,  but  it  is  well  to  pay  some  attention  to  the  facts 
and  experiences  of  history. 


Bi 

§! 

Q  £ 
o  £ 

o  « 


CHAPTEE  V. 

THE   ENGLISH   RACE   HORSE. 

The  real  origin  of  the  English,  race  horse  in  confusion — Full  list  of  the 
"foundation  stock"  as  given  by  Mr.  Weatherby  one  hundred  years  ago — 
The  list  complete  and  embraces  all  of  any  note — Admiral  Rous'  extrava- 
ganza— Godolphin  Arabian's  origin  wholly  unknown — His  history — 
Successful  search  for  his  true  portrait — Stubbs'  picture  a  caricature — The 
true  portrait  alone  supplies  all  that  is  known  of  his  origin  and  blood. 

THE  English  Race  Horse  is  the  great  central  figure  of  all  the 
horse  literature  of  the  past  two  hundred  years.  Much  has  been 
claimed  for  him  and  much  has  been  written  about  him,  in  a  hap- 
hazard way,  by  people  who  know  but  little  of  the  subject.  A  few 
men  of  independent  and  real  thought  have  written  on  this  sub- 
ject, but  they  have  devoted  their  attention  to  the  comparing  of 
family  with  family  or  individual  with  individual.  Of  the  books 
that  have  been  written  by  brainless  people  on  the  English  horse 
there  is  no  end,  and  they  are  generally  mere  repetitions,  without 
giving  credit,  of  what  somebody  has  said  before.  Among  all  the 
books  that  have  been  written  on  this  subject  I  have  never  yet 
found  one  that  even  pretended  to  make  a  serious  attempt  at  dis- 
covering the  real  origin  of  the  English  Race  Horse.  They  all  seem 
to  agree  with  Admiral  Rous  that  he  is  purely  descended  from  the 
Arabian  horse,  and  without  one  drop  of  the  blood  of  the  indig- 
enous English  horse.  The  average  writer  for  the  two  past  cen- 
turies has  been  content  with  just  this  much  knowledge,  and  he 
wants  nothing  more.  Occasionally  it  is  modestly  suggested  in 
some  magazine  article  that  this  exclusively  Arabian  origin  may 
not  be  true,  and  I  am  glad  to  note  that  these  suggestions  are  be- 
coming more  frequent  of  late  years.  It  has  been  claimed  that 
the  pure  Arabian  origin  of  the  race  horse  "is  as  solid  as  a 
pyramid/'  all  of  which  may  be  accepted — but,  unfortunately  for 
the  claimant,  the  "pyramid"  is  standing  on  its  apex,  and  when 
the  facts  breathe  upon  it,  as  gently  as  a  zephyr,  it  will  topple 
over.  The  most  convenient  and  the  most  authoritative  collec- 


68  THE   HOUSE   OF   AMERICA. 

tion  of  facts  relating  to  the  earliest  exotic  horses  that  were 
brought  in  is  to  be  found  in  the  English  Stud  Book  itself,  and 
as  but  few  of  my  readers  have  access  to  this  work,  I  will  copy- 
that  portion  of  it  entire,  as  it  appears  in  the  first  volume,  and 
the  edition  of  1803.  In  the  edition  of  1808  the  list  was  reprinted 
with  four  additional  animals  and  some  verbal  changes,  which,, 
when  important,  will  be  noted. 

''ARABIANS.    BARBS   AND   TURKS." 

1.  The  Helmsley  Turk    was  an  old  Duke  of  Buckingham's  and  got  Bus- 
tler, etc. 

2.  Place's  White  Turk  was  the  property  of  Mr.  Place,  studmaster  to  Oliver 
Cromwell,  when  Protector,  and  was  the  sire  of  Wormwood  Commoner,  and 
the  great  grandams  of  Windham,  Grey  Ramsden  and  Cartouch. 

3.  Royal  Mares:  King  Charles  the  Second  sent  abroad  the  master  of  the 
horse,  to  procure  a  number  of  foreign  horses  and  mares  for  breeding,  and  the 
mares  brought  over  by  him  (as  also  many  of  their  produce)  have  since  been 
called  Royal  Mares. 

4.  Dods worth,  though  foaled  in  England,  was  a  natural  Barb.     His  dam,  a 
Barb  mare,  was  imported  in  the  time  of  Charles  the  Second,  and  was  called  a 
Royal  Mare.     She  was  sold  by  the  studmaster,   after  the  king's  death,  for 
forty  gu  neas,  at  twenty  years  old,  when  in  foal  (by  the  Helmsley  Turk)  with 
Vixen,  dam  of  the  Old  Child  Mare. 

5.  The  Stradling  or  Lister  Turk   was  brought  into  England  by  the  Duke  of 
Berwick,  from  the  siege  of  Buda,  in  the  reign  of  James  the  Second.     He  got 
Snake,  the  D.  of  Kingston's  Brisk  and  Piping  Peg,   Coneyskins,  the  dam  of 
Hip,  and  the  grandam  of  Bolton  Sweepstakes. 

6.  The   Byerly   Turk    was  Captain  Byerly's  charger  in  Ireland,    in   King 
William's  wars  (1869,  etc.).     He  did  not  cover  many  bred  mares,  but  was  the 
sire  of  D.  of  Kingston's  Sprite,  who  was  thought  nearly  as  good   as  Leedes; 
the  D.  of  Rutland's  Black  Hearty   and  Archer,    and  the  D.   of   Devonshire's 
Basto,  Ld.  Bristol's  Grasshopper,  and  Ld.  Godolphin's  Byerly  Gelding,  all  in 
good  forms:  Halloway's  Jigg,  a  middling  horse;  and  Knightley's  Mare,  in  a 
very  good  form. 

7.  Greyhound.     The  cover  of  this  foal  was  in  Barbary,   after  which  both 
his  sire  and  dam  were  purchased,  and  brought  into  England  by  Mr.  Marshall. 
He  was  got  by  King  William's  White  Barb  Chillaby,  out  of  Slugey,  a  natural 
Barb  Mare.     Greyhound  got  the  D.  of   Wharton's  Othello,  said  to  have  beat 
Chanter  easily  in  a  trial,  giving  him  a  stone,  but  who,  falling  lame,  ran  only 
one  match  in  public,  against  a  bad  horse;  he  also  got  Panton's  Whitefoot,  a 
very  good  horse;  Osmyn,  a  very  fleet  horse  and  in  good  form  for  his  size;  the 
D.  of  Wharton's  Rake,  a  middling  horse;  Ld.  Halifax's  Sampson,  Goliah  and 
Favorite,  pretty   good   12-stone   Plate    hordes;    Desdemona,  and  other    good 
mares,  and  several  ordinary  Plate  horses,  who  ran  in  the  North  where  he  was 
a  common  stallion  and  covered  many  of  the  best  mares. 

8.  The    D'Arcy  White  Turk  was  the  sire  of  Old  Hautboy,  Grey    Royal, 
Cannon,  etc. 


THE   ENGLISH   KACE   HORSE.  69 

9.  The  D'Arcy  Yellow  Turk   was  the  sire  of  Spanker,  Brimmer,   and  the 
great-great-grandam  of  Cartouch. 

10.  The   Marshall  or  Selaby   Turk    was  the  property  of  Mr.    Marshall's 
brother,  studmaster  to  King  William,  Queen  Anne,  and  King  George  the  first. 
He  got  the  Curwen  Old  Spot,  the  datu  of  Windhain,  the  dani  of  Derby  Tickle- 
pitcher,  and  great-grandam  of  Bolton  Sloven  and  Fearnought. 

11.  Curwen's   Bay  Barb  was  a   present  to  Louis  the  Fourteenth  from  Muley 
Ishtnael,  King  of  Morocco,   and  was  brought  into  England  by  Mr.  Curwen, 
who  being  in  France  when  Count  Byram  and   Count   Thoulouse  (two  natural 
sons  of  Louis  the  Fourteenth)  were,  the  former,  master  of  the  horse,  and  the 
latter  an  admiral,  he  procured  of  them  two  Barb  horses,  both  of  which  proved 
excellent   stallions,  and   were   well  known    by  the  names  of  the  Curwen  Bay 
Barb  and  the  Thoulouse  Barb.     Curwen's  Bay  Barb  got  Mixbury  and  Tantivy, 
both  very  excellent   formed   Galloways.     The  first  of  them   was  only  thirteen 
hands  two   inches  high,  and  yet  there  were  not  more  than  two  horses  of  his 
time  that  could  beat  him  at  light  weights.     Brocklesby,  Little  George,  Yellow 
Jack,  Bay  Jack,  Monkey,  Dangerfield,  Hip,  Peacock,  and    Flatface,  the  first 
two  in  good  forms,  the  rest  middling;  two  Mixburys,  full  brothers  to  the  first 

Mixbury,  middling  Galloways;  Long  Meg,  Brocklesby  Betty,  and  Creeping 
Molly,  extraordinarily  high-formed  mares';  Whiteneck,  Mistake,  Sparkler, 
and  Lightfoot,  very  good  mares,  and  several  middling  Galloways,  who  ran  for 
Plates  in  the  North.  He  got  two  full  sisters  to  Mixbury,  one  of  which  bred 
Partner,  Little  Scar,  Soreheels  and  the  dam  of  Crab;  the  other  was  the  dam  of 
-Quiet,  Silver  Eye  and  Hazard.  He  did  not  cover  many  mares  except  Mr. 
{Curwen's  and  Mr.  Pelhaui's. 

12.  The  Thoulouse  Barb  became  afterward  the  property  of  Sir  J.  Parsons 
And  was  the  sire  of  Bagpiper,  Blacklegs,  Mr.  Panton's  Molly,  and  the  dam    of 
Cinnamon. 

13.  Barley's    Arabian    was   brought  over   by  a  brother  of  Mr.   Darley,   of 
Yorkshire,  who,  being  an  agent  in  merchandise  abroad,  became  member  of  a 
hunting  club,  by  which  means  he  acquired  interest  to  procure  this  horse.     He 
was  the  sire  of  Childers,  and  also  got  Almanzor,  a  very  good  horse;  a  white- 
legged  horse  of  the  D.  of  Somerset's,  full  brother  to  Almanzor,  and  thought  to 
be  as  good,  but  meeting  with  an  accident,  he  never  ran  in  public;     Cupid  and 
Brisk,  good  horses;  Daedalus,  a  very  swift  horse;    Dart,    Shipjack,  Maica  and 
Aleppo,  good  Plate  homes,  though  out  of  bad  mares;  Ld.  Lonsdale's  Mare  in 
very  good  form,  and  Ld.  Tracy's  Mare  in  a  good  one  for  Plates.     He  covered 
very  few  mares  except  Mr.  Darley's,  who  had   very  few  well-bred  mares  be- 
sides Almanzor's  Dam. 

14.  Sir  J.  William's  Turk  (more  commonly  called  the   Honeywood   Arabian) 
got  Mr.  Honeywood's  two  True  Blues;  the  elder  of  them  was  the   best  Plate 
horse  in  England,  for  four  or  five  years;  the  younger  was  in  very  high   form 
and  got  the  Rumford  Gelding,  and  Ld.  Onslow'sGrey  Horse,  middling  horses  out 
of  road  mares.     It  is  not  known  that  this  Turk  covered  any  bred  mares  except 
the  dam  of  the  two  True  Blues. 

15.  The  Belgrade  Turk  was  taken  at  the  siege  of  Belgrade,  by  Gen.  Merci, 
and  sent  by  him  to  the  Prince  de  Craon,  from  whom  he  was  a  present  to  the 
Prince  of  Lorraine.     He  was  afterward  purchased  by  Sir  Marmaduke  Wyvill, 
and  died  in  his  possession  about  1740. 


70  THE   HOUSE   OF   AMERICA. 

16.  Croft's  Bay  Barb  was  got  by  Chillaby,  out  of  the  Moonah  Barb  Mare. 

17.  The  Godolphin  Arabian  was  imported  by  Mr.  Coke,  at  whose  death  he- 
became  (together   with  Cade,  Regulus,  etc.,  then  young)  the  property  of  Ld. 
Godolphin.     His  first  employment  was  that  of  a  teaser  to  Hobgoblin,  who,  re- 
fusing to  cover  Roxana,  she  was  put  to  the  Arabian,  and  from  that  cover  pro- 
duced Lath,  the  first  of  his  get.     He  was  also   sire  of  Cade,  Regulus,  Blank, 
etc.,  and  what  is  considered  very  remarkable,  as  well  as  a  strong  proof  of  his 
excellence  as  a  stallion,  there  is  not  a  superior  horse  now  on  the  turf  without  a 
cross  of  the  Godolphin  Arabian,  neither  has  there  been  for  several  years  past. 
He  was  a  brown  bay,  with  no  white,  except  on  the  off  heel  behind,  and  about 
fifteen  hands  high  (a  pi  ture  of  him  is  in  the  library  at  Gog  Magog,  Cambridge- 
shire).    It  is  not  known  to  what  particular  race  of  the  Arab  breed,  indeed  it 
has  been  asserted  that  he  was  a  Barb.     He  died  at  Gog  Magog  in  1753,  in  or 
about  the  29th  year  of  his  age.     The  story   of  his  playfellow,  the  black  cat, 
must  not  be  omitted  here,  especially  as  an  erroneous  account  has  got  abroad, 
copied  from  the  first  introduction  to  the  present  work.     Instead  of  his  grieving 
for  the  loss  of  the  cat  she  survived  him,  though  but  for  a  short  time;  she  sat 
upon  him  after  he  was  dead  in  the  building  erected  for  him,  and  followed  him 
to  the  place  where  he  was  buried  under  a  gateway  near  the  running  stable;  sat 
upon  him  there  till  he  was  buried,  then  went  away,  and  never  was  seen  again, 
till  found  dead  in  the  hayloft. 

18.  The  Cullen  Arabian  was  brought  over  by  Mr.  Nosco  and  was  sire  of  Mr. 
Warren's  Camillas,  Ld.  Orford's  Matron,  Mr.   Gorges'  Sour  Face,   the  dam  of 
Regulator,  etc.,  etc. 

19.  The  Coomb  Arabian  (sometimes  called  the  Pigot  Arabian  and  sometimes 
the  Bolingbroke  Grey  Arabian)  was   the  sire   of  Methodist,   the  dam   of  Crop, 
etc.,  etc. 

20.  The  Compton  Barb,  more  commonly  called  the  Sedley  Arabian,  was  sire 
of  Coquette,  Greyling,  etc. 

(ADDITIONS  IN  1808  EDITION.) 

21.  King  James  the  First  bought  an  Arabian  of  Mr    Markham,  a  merchant, 
for  500gs.,  said  (but  with  little  probability)  to  have  been  the  first  of  the  breed 
ever  seen  in  England.     The  Duke  of  Newcastle  says,  in  his  treatise  on  Horse- 
manship, that  he  had  seen  the  above  Arabian,  and  describes  him  as  a  small 
bay  horse,  and  not  of  very  excellent  shape. 

22.  Bloody  Buttocks;  nothing  further  can  be  traced  from  the  papers  of  the 
late   Mr.  Crofts  than  that  he  was  a  grey  Arabian,  with  a  red  mark  on  his 
hip.  from  whence  he  derived  his  name. 

23.  The  Vernon  Arabian    was  a  small  chestnut  horse.     He  covered  at  High- 
flyer H  11,  and  was  the  sire  of  Alert,   etc.     Alert  had  good  speed  for  a  short 
distance. 

24  &  25.  The  Wellesley  Grey,  and  Chestnut  Arabians  (so  called)  were 
brought  from  the  East,  but  evidently  not  Arabians.  The  former  was  a  horse 
of  good  shape,  with  the  size  and  substance  of  an  English  hunter. 

This  list  of  twenty-seven  different  animals,  which  for  the  sake 
of  convenience  I  have  numbered,  was  presented  to  the  publio 


THE    ENGLISH    RACE    HORSE.  71 

more  than  a  hundred  years  ago  by  Mr.  Weatherby,  the  highest  of 
all  English  authorities,  as  the  foundation  stock  from  which  the 
English  race  horse  was  propagated.  The  uniform  omission  of 
dates  of  importations,  etc.,  discloses  the  fact  that  the  compiler 
had  no  accurate  knowledge  of  the  animals  or  their  history,  and 
that  he  was  dependent  largely  upon  very  uncertain  traditions  for 
his  information.  It  must  not  be  understood  that  the  animals  in 
this  list  were  contemporaneous,  or  that  the  list  embraces  all  the 
foreign  animals  that  were  brought  in,  but  only  those  that  were 
recognized  as  of  value  in  founding  the  breed. 

To  understand  just  what  we  have  to  consider,  I  will  place  here, 
in  juxtaposition  to  the  above  list,  the  remark  of  Admiral  Kous,  at 
one  time  the  great  race-horse  authority  of  England,  which  ex- 
presses the  popular  opinion  as  to  the  origin  of  the  race  horse, 
that  is  practically  universally  held  in  all  lands.  The  admiral 
says:  "The  British  race  horse  is  a  pure  Eastern  exotic  whose 
pedigree  may  be  traced  two  thousand  years,  the  true  son  of 
Arabia  Deserta,  without  a  drop  of  English  blood."  To  reach 
the  approximate  truth  on  the  issue  here  made,  and  to  puncture 
this  extravaganza  is  the  work  now  before  us. 

Numbers  1,  2,  5,  6,  8,  9,  10, 14, 15,  were  Turks,  and  to  these  we 
may  add  Mr.  Darley's  horse,  known  as  the  Darley  Arabian,  num- 
ber 13,  for  he  was  brought  from  Aleppo  in  Turkey,  far  removed 
from  Arabia,  and  famous  for  the  great  numbers  and  excellence  of 
its  horses  many  centuries  before  Arabia  had  any  horses.  To  carry 
horses,  for  sale,  from  the  deserts  of  Arabia,  where  they  are 
scarce,  to  the  region  of  Aleppo,  where  they  are  very  plenty,  and 
of  the  highest  quality,  would  be  simply  "carrying  coals  to  New- 
castle." We  may  therefore  safely  conclude  that  the  ten  horses 
here  enumerated  were  Turks. 

Numbers  4,  7,  11,  12,  16,  20  were  Barbs,  as  they  are  named  in 
the  list.  It  is  a  surprise  to  me  that  these  six  horses  should  be 
designated  as  "Barbs,"  for  it  has  been  the  usage  of  many  gener- 
ations to  call  these  horses  "Arabians."  As  late  as  1819  the  Dey 
of  Algiers  sent  several  Algerine  horses  as  a  present  to  the  Prince 
Regent  of  England,  and  they  were  always  spoken  of  as  "Arabians." 

Numbers  17,  18,  19,  21,22,  23,  24,  25  are  all  unsatisfactory  as  to 
their  origin.  Number  17 — Lord  Godolphin's  horse — is  wholly 
unknown  as  to  his  blood  elements,  and  further  on  his  history  will 
be  considered.  Number  18  "was  brought  over,"  but  from 
whence  nobody  knows.  Number  19  is  in  the  same  condition,  and 


72  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

not  one  of  his  different  owners  has  been  able  to  teli  us  anything 
about  his  origin.  Number  21  was,  possibly,  an  Arabian,  but  the 
Duke  of  Newcastle,  who  knew  the  horse  well,  seems  to  have 
doubted  his  genuineness  on  account  of  Ids  inferiority.  However 
this  ma*y  have  been,  he  preceded  other  importations  so  many 
years  that  it  is  not  known  that  he  ever  sired  a  colt,  and  as  a  pro- 
genitor we  may  as  well  strike  him  out.  Number  22  seems  to  be 
in  darjkness,  and  all  efforts  to  find  his  origin  having  failed  he  may 
as  well  be  classed  as  unknown.  Number  23  is  furnished  with  no 
evidence  that  he  was  entitled  to  be  classed  as  an  Arabian.  Num- 
bers 24  and  25  were  confessedly  not  genuine. 

This  reduces  the  analysis  to  its  lowest  form  and  shows  that  in 
the  original  foundation  stock,  including  Mr.  Parley's  horse  (13), 
there  were  ten  Turks  and  six  Barbs  that  can  be  accepted  with 
reasonable  certainty.  This  leaves  eight  so-called  "Arabians/' 
from  which  we  must  eliminate  numbers  17,  21,  24,  25,  leaving 
numbers  18,  19,  22,  23,  without  any  evidence  whatever  that  they 
were  Arabians  except  in  name.  From  these  four  rather  obscure 
animals,  therefore,  according  to  the  Rous  dictum,  the  English 
race  horse  must  have  derived  every  drop  of  his  blood;  and  yet 
there  is  not  a  scintilla  of  evidence  either  direct  or  inferential  that 
any  one  of  them,  or  the  ancestors  of  any  one  of  them,  ever  saw 
Arabia.  From  the  custom  of  calling  every  horse  from  abroad 
an  "Arabian,"  that  has  prevailed  in  England  for  more  than  two 
hundred  years,  it  is  fair  to  conclude  that  there  was  no  Arabian 
blood  in  the  foundation  stock.  It  was  the  blood  of  the  Turks 
and  the  Barbs,  commingled  with  that  of  the  native  blood  that  had 
been  bred  to  race  for  centuries,  that  furnished  the  foundation  of 
the  modern  English  and  American  race  horse. 

Blood  in  the  race  horse  is  an  imperative  necessity,  but  it  must 
be  blood  that  has  been  carefully  selected  from  winners,  and  raced 
for  generations,  or  it  is  of  no  value  as  an  element  of  speed.  If 
the  English  race  horse  had  been  a  strictly  pure  exotic  from 
Arabia  Deserta,  as  Admiral  Rous  maintained,  he  would  have 
been  of  no  value  either  as  a  race  horse  or  the  progenitor  of  race 
horses,  without  many  generations  of  careful  selection  and  develop- 
ment of  speed. 

The  Godolphin  Arabian  was  altogether  the  greatest  horse  of 
his  century.  He  nourished  during  most  of  the  reign  of  King 
George  II,,  but  the  horsemen  of  the  world,  even  Englishmen 
themselves,  know  far  more  about  him  than  they  do  about  the 


THE   ENGLISH   RACE   HORSE.  73 

reign  of  that  monarch.  Still,  nobody  knows  anything  of  his 
birthplace,  his  origin  or  his  blood.  He  was  to  the  English  race 
horse  what  Rysdyk's  Hambletonian  has  been  to  the  American 
trotter.  Neither  of  them  was  ever  in  a  race,  but  each  of  them 
stood  immeasurably  superior  to  all  others  of  his  day  as  a  pro- 
genitor of  speed,  at  his  own  gait.  From  the  latter  we  had  reason 
to  expect  speed  because  we  knew  he  inherited  speed,  but  from 
the  former  we  had  no  reason  to  expect  anything,  for  we  knew 
nothing  of  what  he  inherited  until  he  proved  his  inheritance  by 
what  he  transmitted  to  his  progeny.  Some  of  the  principal  semi- 
tragic  incidents,  so  far  as  known  in  the  early  life  of  Godolphin 
Arabian,  were  seized  upon  by  the  great  novelist  Eugene  Sue,  and 
out  of  them  grew  a  "horse  novel"  from  his  gifted  pen.  The 
horse  was  foaled  about  1724,  was  brought  to  England  from  France 
about  1730,  and  died  at  Magog  Hills,  1753.  There  seems  to  be  a 
substantial  agreement  among  those  who  had  the  best  opportuni- 
ties to  know  that  the  horse  was  employed  on  the  streets  of  Paris 
as  a  common  drudge  in  a  cart  and  driven  by  a  brutal  master.  A 
Mr.  Coke,  who  is  represented  to  have  been  a  Quaker,  was  in  Paris 
on  business  and  he  happened  to  witness  the.  brutality  of  the 
ruffian  who  was  this  horse's  master  in  trying  to  make  him  draw  a 
load  of  wood  up  a  steep  acclivity  on  to  a  new  bridge,  which  the 
horse  after  repeated  trials  and  clubbings  was  unable  to  accom- 
plish. To  relieve  the  poor  brute  from  his  sufferings,  Mr.  Coke's 
feelings  of  humanity  asserted  themselves,  and  he  stepped  forward 
and  bought  the  horse  on  the  spot  and  had  him  released  from  the 
cart.  Mr.  Coke,  it  is  said,  brought  the  horse  to  London  and  pre- 
sented him  to  Mr.  Williams,  the  proprietor  of  a  famous  coffee- 
house, and  Mr.  Williams  presented  him  to  Earl  Godolphin. 

In  September,  1829,  Mr.  John  S.  Skinner  commenced  the  publi- 
cation of  the  first  horse  magazine  that  ever  appeared  in  this 
country,  and  in  the  first  number  there  appeared  a  steel  engraving 
purporting  to  be  executed  by  the  famous  Stubbs  and  to  represent 
the  great  horse,  Godolphin  Arabian.  Not  many  years  afterward 
I  came  into  possession  of  a  copy  of  this  publication  from  the  be- 
ginning, and  the  sight  of  this  picture  always  impressed  me  as  the 
most  ludicrous  abortion  of  the  likeness  of  a  horse  that  could  be 
conceived  of.  The  neck  was  absolutely  longer  than  the  body, 
the  legs  were  about  strong  enough  for  a  sheep,  and  all  over  it 
lacked  strength  of  both  muscle  and  bone  to  a  most  absurd  extent. 
When  this  picture  appeared  in  London,  some  years  before,  it  was 


74  THE   HOESE   OF   AMEEICA. 

laughed  at  by  all  artists  as  well  as  by  all  men  who  knew  anything 
about  the  shape  of  a  horse,  as  a  monstrosity,  and  it  was  received 
in  the  same  spirit  on  this  side  of  the  water;  but  it  bore  the  name 
of  a  great  artist  and  that  was  sufficient  to  secure  the  approbation 
of  the  unthinking  and  the  unknowing.  The  only  key  to  the 
origin  of  the  horse,  the  only  pedigree  that  can  be  given,  must  be 
found  written  in  his  own  structure  of  bone  and  muscle  and 
brain.  A  true  delineation,  therefore,  of  his  form  and  shape  be- 
came a  matter  of  the  highest  moment,  not  merely  to  satisfy  the 
curiosity  of  the  curious,  but  as  a  study  of  the  true  sources  of  his 
wonderful  prepotency. 

Sixty-five  years  ago  a  correspondent  of  Mr.  Skinner's  maga- 
zine, referred  to  above,  and  a  descendant  of  Mr.  Samuel  Gallo- 
way of  Maryland,  spoke  of  an  oil  painting  of  Godolphin  Arabian 
that  had  hung  in  the  hall  at  Tulip  Hill  from  the  days  of  his 
childhood  as  still  hanging  there,  and  said  that  it  was  wholly 
unlike  the  Stubbs  engraving.  Mr.  Galloway  was  one  of  Mary- 
land's land  barons,  an  enthusiastic  horse  breeder,  and  a  success- 
ful horse  racer.  He  was  educated  at  Cambridge,  I  think;  and  if 
so,  no  doubt  he  saw  Godolphin  Arabian  many  times  before  he 
died,  for  he  was  within  four  or  five  miles  of  him,  and  his  sport- 
ing instincts  could  not  fail  to  take  him  to  see  so  great  a  horse 
when  so  near  at  hand.  As  he  was  a  young  man  of  great  wealth 
and  great  ambitions,  it  is  quite  probable  he  was  on  terms  of 
friendly  acquaintance,  if  not  intimacy,  with  Lord  Godolphin,  and 
thus  secured  the  oil  painting  from  that  distinguished  friend  him- 
self. This  theory  is  strengthened  by  the  fact  that  the  picture 
still  bears  the  coat  of  arms  of  Lord  Godolphin. 

To  reach  and  secure  this  picture,  or  at  least  a  faithful  copy  of 
it,  became  an  object  of  continuous  effort  that  was  never  inter- 
mitted for  more  than  twenty  years.  At  last,  in  the  spring  of 
1877,  one  of  the  correspondents  of  Wallace's  Monthly,  Prof.  M.  0. 
Ellzey,  of  Blacksburg,  Virginia,  wrote  me  that  the  picture  was 
then  the  property  of  Dr.  J.  H.  Murray  (whose  wife  was  a  lineal 
descendant  of  Mr.  Galloway)  of  Cedar  Park,  adjoining  Tulip  Hill, 
West  River,  Maryland,  and  that  he  would  have  the  picture  sent 
to  me.  In  a  few  days  it  arrived,  and  when  my  eyes  rested  upon 
it,  it  was  like  the  feast  of  a  lifetime;  for  there  was  all  that  could 
ever  be  known  of  the  greatest  horse  of  his  century.  The  paint- 
ing was  in  a  state  of  excellent  preservation  and  the  coat  of  arms 
of  Lord  Godolphin  was  plainly  traceable.  The  horse  is  shown 


THE   ENGLISH   EACE   HORSE.  75 

from  his  right  side,  in  his  rough,  paddock  condition,  with  his 
right  hind  foot  a  little  advanced,  and  his  head  low  and  without 
any  animation  or  excitement.  The  standpoint  of  the  artist  is  a 
little  forward  of  the  shoulders,  and  he  must  have  been  a  tall  man 
or  the  horse  must  have  been  a  low  horse,  or  perhaps  both,  for 
he  sees  over  the  horse  and  portrays  the  fine  spring  of  muscle  over 
the  loin,  on  the  opposite  side  of  the  vertebra.  From  the  position 
of  the  artist  the  drawing  is  slightly  foreshortened,  and  this,  to- 
gether with  the  advance  of  his  right  hind  foot,  intensifies  the 
droop  of  the  rump,  to  some  degree,  in  the  outline.  From  the 
proportions,  as  shown  in  the  painting,  I  would  conclude  he  was 
below  fourteen  and  a  half  hands  high  rather  than  above  it.  His 
head  is  striking  and  unusually  large  for  an  animal  of  his  size, 
with  remarkable  width  between  the  eyes,  and  without  a  star  to 
lighten  it  up.  His  ear  is  not  fine,  and  it  droops  backward  as  he 
stands,  as  if  half-asleep.  His  mane  is  sparse  and  in  disorder. 
His  throat-latch  is  very  good,  and  the  windpipe  large  and  well 
developed.  The  neck  is  of  a  fair  length  for  a  horse  of  his  blocky 
formation,  and  there  is  nothing  unusual  about  it  except  its  great 
depth  at  the  collar  place.  The  slope  of  the  shoulder  is  very 
marked  and  shows  his  ability  to  carry  his  head  in  the  air  when 
he  wished  to  do  so,  but  the  shoulder  itself  is  coarse  and  angular 
to  an  unusual  degree.  His  withers  rise  very  abruptly  and  there 
is  great  perpendicular  depth  through  the  carcass  at  this  point. 
His  back  is  remarkably  short  and  the  spread  and  arch  of  his  loins 
is  simply  magnificent.  But  the  point  of  superlative  excellence  is 
in  the  remarkable  development  of  power  in  his  quarters.  His 
limbs,  instead  of  being  "spider  legs,"  are  unusually  strong  for 
an  animal  of  his  size;  indeed,  they  might  be  considered  coarse 
for  any  horse  that  was  pretended  to  be  a  race  horse.  His  tail  is 
of  the  usual  weight  and  somewhat  wavy.  With  the  addition  that 
there  is  a  little  white  at  the  coronet  of  the  right  hind  foot, 
and  not  forgetting  his  friend  and  companion  the  cat,  I  have 
made  a  somewhat  detailed  description  of  what  is  represented  in 
the  painting.  Several  artists  examined  the  picture,  and  they 
pronounced  it  the  work  of  an  artist  of  ability  and  experience. 
The  signature  "D.  M.  pinxt"  was  carefully  examined,  but  no 
one  was  able  to  throw  any  light  upon  the  name  represented  by 
the  initial  letters  "D.  M." 

While  this  painting  contained    within  itself  evidence   of  its 
great  value  as  a  likeness  of  its  subject,  it  lacked  confirmation 


76  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

as  "true  to  the  life;"  and  nothing  could  supply  this 
lack  but  to  find  a  portrait  of  the  same  horse,  painted  by  another 
artist,  and  then  if  the  two  agreed,  the  proof  would  be  fully  satis- 
fying to  the  understanding.  A  little  over  a  hundred  years  ago 
Lord  Francis  Godolphin  Osborne,  Duke  of  Leeds,  and  heir  to 
Lord  Godolphin,  wrote  Sir  Charles  Bunbury,  a  great  race-horse 
man,  that  he  had  a  painting  of  Godolphin  Arabian,  by  Wootton, 
at  Gog  Magog  Hills.  Over  sixty  years  ago  an  American  gentle- 
man wrote  to  Mr.  Skinner's  magazine  that  he  had  seen  a  paint- 
ing of  Godolphin  Arabian  banging  in  Houghton  Hall,  Norfolk. 
In  1878  my  physician  told  me  I  must  quit  work  for  awhile,  and 
that  I  had  better  visit  the  great  Exposition  at  Paris  that  year.  I 
was  anxious  to  see  the  Fair,  but  I  was  a  great  deal  more  anxious 
to  see  those  two  paintings  of  Godolphin  Arabian,  if  they  were 
still  in  existence.  Gog  Magog  Hills  is  a  quaint  old  place,  and  the 
origin  and  meaning  of  its  name  is  lost  in  a  very  remote  antiquity. 
As  it  has  not  been  the  residence  of  its  owners  for  more  than  a 
hundred  years,  it  is  much  neglected.  The  people  in  charge  were 
very  obliging,  and  I  was  immediately  admitted  to  the  view  of 
Wootton's  painting  of  Godolphin  Arabian.  The  first  glance  was 
a  complete  vindication  of  the  truthfulness  of  the  Maryland  paint- 
ing as  a  true  likeness  in  every  important  feature  of  the  outline 
and  proportions.  The  canvas  is  about  four  and  a  half  by  four 
feet,  inclosed  in  a  massive  frame.  After  studying  it  and  com- 
paring it,  point  by  point  for  more  than  an  hour,  with  a  copy  of 
the  Maryland  painting,  it  became  evident  they  were  not  painted 
by  the  same  hand,  although  the  horse  had  the  same  position  in 
both  pictures,  with  the  exception  that  the  right  hind  foot  was 
thrown  backward  in  the  Wootton  painting  instead  of  forward, 
and  thus  gave  a  less  abrupt  droop  of  the  rump.  The  head  was 
precisely  the  same  shape,  but  in  the  large  painting  the  articula- 
tions were  less  distinct  and  expressive. 

After  a  little  peregrination  through  Norfolk,  studying  the 
"Norfolk  Trotter"  as  then  called,  but  since  called  "Hackney," 
on  his  "native  heath,"  I  reached  Houghton  Hall,  in  Norfolk. 
This  grand  old  place  was  built  over  a  hundred  and  sixty  years 
ago  by  the  famous  Sir  Eobert  Walpole,  and  at  that  time  it  was 
considered  the  most  splendid  structure,  as  a  gentleman's  country 
seat,  in  all  England.  For  many  years  it  has  been  the  property 
of  the  Marquis  of  Cholmondeley,  but  is  not  often  occupied  as  a 
residence.  Here  too,  I  was  lucky,  for  upon  my  entrance  to  th& 


THE   ENGLISH   KACE   HORSE.  77 

picture  gallery,  about  the  first  object  upon  which  my  eye  rested 
was  the  painting  of  the  Godolphin  Arabian,  and  the  first  impres- 
sion was  that  there  must  be  "spooks"  around,  for  that  seemed 
certainly  the  Maryland  picture  I  was  looking  at.  I  had  it  taken 
down  and  removed  to  a  good  light,  and  there  the  whole  mystery 
was  removed.  It  is  difficult  to  compare  two  peas.  All  you  can 
say  about  them  is  that  they  were  just  alike,  and  that  is  all  I  can 
say  about  the  Galloway  picture  in  Maryland  and  the  Houghton 
Hall  picture  in  England.  The  paintings  were  the  same  size,  and 
the  pigments  used  were  of  precisely  the  same  shades  of  color  and 
quality.  The  colors  were  peculiar  in  the  fact  that  the  artist  had 
used  no  varnish  nor  oil  that  would  leave  a  shiny  appearance. 
The  Houghton  Hall  picture  had  a  black,  glossy  margin  all  around 
it  of  about  five  inches  in  width  on  which  the  names  of  the  most 
noted  of  his  progeny  were  inscribed  in  gold  letters,  and  at  the 
bottom  was  this  inscription:  "The  original  picture  taken  at  The 
Hills,  by  D.  Murrier,  painter  to  H.  K.  H.  the  Duke  of  Cumber- 
land." This  explained  the  modest  signature  attached  to  the 
Maryland  picture,  which  was  a  replica  of  the  original.  "The 
Hills"  is  the  local  designation  of  "Gog  Magog  Hills."  The  word 
"original"  not  only  implies  that  the  picture  was  made  from  life, 
but  that  one  or  more  replicas  were  made  at  the  same  time. 

Here,  then,  in  this  picture,  we  have  all  that  we  know  or  proba- 
bly ever  will  know  of  the  origin  and  pedigree  of  this  horse.  It 
does  not  tell  us  what  he  was,  but  it  does  tell  us  in  the  most  clear 
and  unmistakable  language  what  he  was  not.  There  is  no  feature 
nor  element  in  his  make-up  that  does  not  say  that  he  was  neither 
an  Arabian  nor  a  Barb.  He  was  a  stout,  strong-boned,  heavily 
muscled,  short-legged  horse.  In  his  form  and  shape  he  was  very 
far  removed  from  an  ideal  progenitor  of  race  horses,  but  he  was 
that  progenitor  all  the  same.  About  forty  years  after  his  death 
Mr.  Stubbs,  who  never  saw  the  horse,  brought  out  a  painting  of 
him  which  all  artists  laughed  at  as  the  picture  of  an  impossible 
horse.  This  picture,  however,  was  engraved  on  steel  and  became 
the  standard  representation  of  Godolphin  Arabian,  in  England, 
till  this  day.  Both  these  pictures  are  here  given,  and  a  com- 
parison of  many  points  makes  it  evident  that  Stubbs  copied  from 
the  original  of  Murrier  or  from  the  painting  by  Wootton,  which 
was  probably  also  a  copy  of  Murrier,  and  he  followed  his  copy 
just  as  closely  as  he  could  while  converting  a  big-boned,  stout 
saddle  horse  into  a  long-necked,  spindle-shanked  race  horse. 


78  THE   HOUSE   OF   AMERICA. 

By  actual  measurement  the  neck  is  longer  than  the  body,  but  it 
is  not  necessary  to  point  out  the  Stubbs  absurdities,  as  they  are 
apparent  to  every  eye.  It  was  simply  an  awkward  and  dishonest 
attempt  to  express  in  his  form  and  shape  such  a  pedigree  as  a 
great  racing  sire  should  have  had.  In  these  two  pictures  we  have 
the  real  and  the  imaginary — the  honest  and  the  dishonest. 

The  search  for  this  picture  and  then  for  its  verification  was  a 
labor  of  many  years.  I  never  expected  to  find  the  horse's  origin, 
but  the  discovery  of  his  likeness  seemed  to  be  in  the  bounds  of  a 
possibility  that  was  finally  realized.  Murrier's  picture,  as  a 
mere  work  of  art,  is  of  no  mean  value.  It  contains  within  itself 
undoubted  evidence  that  it  is  a  true  picture  of  a  horse,  and  it  is 
shown  circumstantially  that  this  horse  was  the  great  "unknown 
and  untraced  founder"  of  the  English  race  horse,  with  nothing 
of  the  race  horse  in  his  appearance. 

The  name  of  this  horse  has  been  a  misnomer  ever  since  the 
day  he  fell  into  the  hands  of  Lord  Godolphin,  and  it  has  misled 
a  multitude  of  men  to  their  financial  hurt.  Of  late  years  the 
more  intelligent  class  of  writers,  instead  of  calling  him  an 
"Arabian"  call  him  a  "Barb,"  but  there  is  just  as  much  pro- 
priety in  using  one  name  as  the  other,  and  not  a  scintilla  of 
authority  for  using  either.  Whatever  may  have  been  his  origin, 
his  marvelous  structural  combination  of  propelling  power  sup- 
plied what  was  wanting  in  the  English  stock  of  his  day,  and  gave 
him  success.  Since  then  thousands  of  Arabians  and  Barbs  have 
been  tried  and  all  of  them  have  failed. 


CHAPTER  VI. 

THE  ENGLISH  RACE  HORSE  (Continued). 

England  supplied  with  horses  be  ore  the  Christian  era — Bred  for  different 
purposes — Markhain  on  the  speed  of  early  native  horses — Duke  of  New- 
castle on  Arabians — Hisch  ice  of  blood  to  propagate — Size  of  early  English 
horses — Difficulties  about  pedigrees  in  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth 
centuries — Early  accumulations  very  trashy — The  Galloways  and  Irish 
Hobbies — Discrepancies  in  size — The  old  saddle  stock — The  pacers  wiped 
out — Partial  revision  of  the  English  Stud  Book. 

BRITAIN  was  fully  supplied  with  horses  when  first  invaded  by 
the  Romans,  but  as  there  is  no  history  beyond  that  period  we  are 
only  groping  in  the  dark  when  we  attempt  to  discover  when  or 
whence  this  supply  was  procured.  The  most  reasonable  theory 
is  that  the  first  supply  came  from  the  Phoenician  merchants, 
when  they  were  trading  for  tin  in  the  southwestern  part  of 
Britain.  If  this  theory  be  correct,  the  trading  between  the 
Phoenicians  and  the  Britons  could  hardly  have  been  later  than 
the  fourth  century  before  the  Christian  era,  and  it  is  more  prob- 
able that  it  was  several  centuries  earlier.  This  topic,  however, 
has  been  considered  in  a  preceding  chapter.  Another  theory  is 
that  when  the  tides  of  migration  struck  the  Atlantic,  in  the 
higher  latitudes,  there  was  a  natural  deflection  toward  the 
warmer  countries  of  the  south,  the  people  carrying  their  horses 
with  them.  But  from  the  primitive  condition  of  the  arts  and  of 
maritime  affairs  among  the  Norsemen  of  that  very  early  period, 
and  from  the  insular  position  of  Britain,  it  seems  to  me  that  to 
reach  it  with  horses,  the  most  probable  source  of  supply  was  from 
that  great  nation  whose  "ships  of  Tarshish"  had  been  trading  to 
all  -lands  more  than  a  thousand  years  before  the  Christian  era. 
But,  laying  all  theories  aside,  there  are  some  facts  and  dates  that 
we  know,  and  the  particular  one  to  which  I  wish  here  to  call  at- 
tention is  the  historical  record  that  when  the  Romans  first  visited 
Britain  they  found  an  abundant  supply  of  horses;  and  this  was 
about  four  hundred  years  before  Arabia  received  her  supply  from 
the  Emperor  Constantius. 


80  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA.. 

From  the  time  of  the  Romans  in  Britain,  horse-racing  has  been 
a  popular  and  favorite  amusement  of  our  ancestors,  and  from  that 
time  horses  have  been  bred  for  special  purposes.  The  "Great 
Horse/'  as  he  was  called,  was  bred  for  war,  parade,  and  show, 
and  was  large  enough  and  strong  enough  to  carry  a  knight  in 
armor.  The  smaller  horses  were  bred  for  the  race  or  the  chase, 
others  for  the  saddle  on  account  of  their  easy,  gliding  motion,  and 
the  comfort  of  the  rider,  while  others,  again,  were  stout  of  back  and 
limb  and  able  to  carry  burdens.  In  regard  to  the  speed  of  the 
horses  bred  for  that  purpose,  Mr.  Gervase  Markham,  the  second 
Englishman  who  undertook  to  write  a  book  on  the  horse,  has 
given  us  some  very  interesting  and  valuable  information.  He 
brought  out  his  work  in  the  latter  part  of  the  sixteenth  century, 
and  it  passed  through  several  "enlarged  and  improved"  editions. 
In  the  edition  of  1606  he  says: 

"For  swiftness  what  nation  has  brought  forth  the  horse  which  excelled  the 
English  ?  When  the  best  Barbaries  that  ever  were  in  their  prime,  I  saw  them 
overcome  by  a  black  Hobbie,  of  Salisbury,  and  yet  that  black  Hobbie  was  over- 
come by  a  horse  called  Valentine,  which  Valentine  neither  in  hunting  nor 
running  was  ever  equalled,  yet  was  a  plain  English  horse,  both  by  syre  and 
dam." 

From  this  we  must  conclude  that  some  horses  from  the  Bar- 
bary  States  had  been  brought  over  previous  to  1606,  which  doubt- 
less antedated  the  arrival  of  King  James'  Arabian.  This  is  the 
horse  known  as  the  Markham  Arabian,  and  is  in  the  above  list  of 
foundation  stallions.  In  speaking  of  the  Arabian  horses  as  a 
breed,  the  Duke  of  Newcastle  remarks  as  follows  upon  this 
particular  representative  of  that  breed: 

"I  never  saw  but  one  of  these  horses,  which  Mr.  John  Markham,  a 
merchant,  brought  over  and  said  he  was  a  right  Arabian.  He  was  a  bay,  but  a 
little  horse,  and  no  rarity  for  shape,  for  I  have  seen  many  English  horses  far 
finer.  Mr.  Markham  sold  him  to  King  James  for  five  hundred  pounds,  and 
being  trained  up  for  a  course  (race),  when  he  came  to  run  every  horse  beat 
him." 

The  duke  then  goes  on  to  speak  of  the  staying  qualities  of  the 
Arabians: 

"  They  talk  they  will  ride  fourscore  miles  in  a  day  and  never  draw 
the  bridle.  When  I  was  young  I  could  have  bought  a  nag  for  ten  pounds  that 
would  have  done  as  much  very  easily" 


THE   ENGLISH   RACE   HORSE.  81 

These  remarks  are  repeated  here  because  they  are  specially  per- 
tinent in  this  connection. 

It  will  be  conceded  by  every  one  who  has  any  knowledge  of  the 
horse  history  of  this  period  that  the  Duke  of  Newcastle  was  the 
best-informed  man  of  his  generation  on  all  subjects  connected 
with  the  history  and  breeding  of  the  horse.  His  preference  for 
blood  was  in  the  following  order:  The  Barb,  the  Turk,  the 
Spaniard,  the  Neapolitan,  and  the  handsomest  of  the  English 
stock.  It  will  be  observed  that  in  this  classification  the  Arabian 
has  no  place. 

From  these  illustrations,  to  which  other  similar  ones  might  be 
added,  it  seems  to  be  evident  that  the  native  English  stock  did 
not  lack  speed  so  much  as  they  lacked  quality,  finish,  and  beauty. 
Perhaps  size  should  be  included  in  this  enumeration.  They  had 
heen  bred  and  trained  to  run  for  centuries,  and  they  were  as  stout 
and  fleet  as  the  exotics,  but  they  lacked  the  qualifications  of 
beauty  and  style.  The  foreigners  possessed  what  the  natives 
lacked,  and  more  than  all  they  furnished  both  the  climatic  and 
the  blood  outcross  that  were  needed  to  re-invigorate  the  native 
character.  It  was  the  custom  of  the  people  in  the  seventeenth 
century  to  let  their  horses  of  both  sexes  roam  at  will  through 
forests  and  glades,  and  in  this  way  the  average  size  had  been  re- 
duced and  the  law  of  Henry  VIII.  (prohibiting  the  running  at 
large  of  stallions  under  a  certain  size)  had  become  a  nullity. 
At  the  time  of  the  restoration  of  Charles  II.  (1660)  the  average 
size  of  the  traveling  stock  of  England  was  very  small — perhaps 
not  over  thirteen  hands  high — and  then  commenced  the  serious 
work  of  increasing  the  size  and  improving  the  speed  of  the  light 
horse  stock,  under  the  direction  and  influence  of  the  Duke  of 
Newcastle.  The  introduction  of  the  new  blood  would  give  vigor 
to  the  stock,  but  as  that  blood  was  the  blood  of  Turks  and  Barbs, 
probably  but  little  if  any  larger  than  the  native  stock,  the  mys- 
tery still  remains  unsolved.  In  about  one  hundred  years  from 
that  time  the  average  size  of  the  race  horse  had  been  brought  up 
from  less  than  fourteen  to  about  fifteen  hands.  This  increase  of 
size  cannot  be  accounted  for  on  any  other  grounds  than  the  in- 
troduction of  the  blood  of  some  larger  breed.  We  cannot  con- 
ceive of  this  being  the  blood  of  the  old  Flanders  stock  that  had 
been  brought  over  centuries  before;  hence  I  am  strongly  of  the 
opinion  that  the  duke  knew  just  what  he  was  doing  when  he 
brought  in  a  lot  of  stallions  and  mares  (the  latter  called  the 


82  THE   HOUSE   OF   AMERICA. 

"Royal  Mares")  without  telling  anybody  what  they  were  or 
where  they  came  from.  This  view  is  strengthened  by  the  fact 
that  none  of  the  descendants  of  these  mares,  for  several  genera- 
tions, ever  made  a  mark  upon  the  turf.  If  we  reject  this  theory 
of  the  "Royal  Mares/'  we  are  then  forced  to  the  conclusion  that 
the  increase  of  size  came  chiefly  from  the  large  cold-blooded 
mares  of  the  native  stock.  The  fleet  running  families  of  the 
natives  were  small,  and  the  imported  Turks  and  Barbs  were  but 
little  if  any  larger;  hence,  if  we  accept  the  evidence  of  our  own 
senses  and  study  the  great  variations  in  height,  we  cannot  reject 
the  conclusion  that  these  variations  had  their  origin  in  the  size 
of  the  original  elements  entering  into  the  formation  of  the  breed. 
What  was  the  extent  of  the  influence  of  the  speed  of  the  old 
English  race  horse  upon  the  new  race  horse  that  sprang  up  in  the 
seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries?  This  is  a  question  that 
has  not  been  very  much  discussed,  but  every  intelligent  and 
thinking  man  has  given  it  more  or  less  thought.  Britain  was 
not  rapid  in  the  progress  of  civilization  and  refinement,  but 
through  all  the  centuries  of  her  history  she  had  her  race  horses 
and  she  ran  them.  There  can  be  no  doubt  that  many  of  these 
native  horses  could  outrun  and  outlast  the  best  of  the  exotics 
that  were' brought  in.  None  of  those  exotics,  so  far  as  we  know, 
could  run  and  win.  Their  value,  then,  was  measured,  not  by 
what  they  could  do  themselves,  but  by  what  their  progeny  could 
do;  and  that  progeny,  at  the  foundation,  carried  half  the  blood  of 
the  old  tribes.  There  were  no  racing  calendars  in  the  seven- 
teenth century  and  none  till  the  second  decade  of  the  eighteenth, 
and  during  all  that  time  the  blood  of  every  man's  horse  would, 
naturally,  be  fashionable  blood.  When  the  racing  calendars 
were  established  they  were  a  partial  check  upon  untruthful  repre- 
sentations, but  this  check  only  extended  to  the  sire  of  the  ani- 
mal, and  was  then  not  always  trustworthy.  This  left  the  whole 
maternal  side  open  to  all  kinds  of  misrepresentation,  and  as  the 
Anglo-Saxon  race  is  fond  of  liberty,  every  man  exercised  the 
liberty  of  making  his  pedigrees  to  suit  himself.  Thus,  through 
advertisements,  sale  papers,  etc.,  great  multitudes  of  fictitious 
pedigrees,  all  shaped  on  fashionable  lines,  gained  currency  and 
were  propagated  from  owner  to  owner,  from  generation  to  gener- 
ation. On  this  point  I  speak  from  the  personal  knowledge  of  a. 
long  lifetime  in  connection  with  such  affairs  in  our  own  country, 
and  I  take  it  for  granted  that  our  English  ancestors  were  no- 


THE   ENGLISH   RACE   HORSE.  83 

better  and  no  worse  than  we  are  ourselves.  This  was  the  condi- 
tion of  things  in  England  for  about  one  hundred  and  fifty  years, 
and  when  Mr.  Weatherby  was  at  work  on  the  Stud  Book  he  was 
overflowed  with  a  flood  of  those  bald-headed  fictions,  concocted  by 
generations  long  past,  and  nobody  could  disprove  them.  In 
this  way  a  large  portion  of  the  accumulated  rubbish  of  past  gen- 
erations found  its  way  into  the  English  Stud  Book  and  there  it 
stands  to-day,  serving  only  to  misguide  the  seeker  after  truth. 

The  earliest  records  of  English  racing  commence  with  the  year 
1709,  and  at  Newmarket  1716.  There  have  been  several  racing 
calendars  published  at  different  times,  but  probably  the  best  and 
most  convenient  for  office  use  is  the  Racing  Register  published 
by  Bailey  Bros.,  commencing  with  the  first  and  now  filling  several 
large  volumes.  In  the  early  days  very  few  of  the  winners  even 
had  any  pedigree,  but  after  the  lapse  of  about  fifty  years  we  find 
it  the  rule  to  insert  the  sire  of  all  winners,  although  there  were 
still  some  exceptions.  Under  this  usage  it  became  possible  in 
the  course  of  time  to  establish  the  leading  facts  on  the  paternal 
side,  and  thus  the  work  of  the  stud-book  compiler  was  greatly 
facilitated.  Those  racing  calendars,  although  intended  merely 
to  serve  the  convenience  of  men  who  bet  their  money,  caring 
nothing  for  blood,  served  the  more  permanent  and  valuable  pur- 
pose of  fixing  the  paternal  lines  in  the  genealogy  of  the  English 
race  horse. 

In  1786  Mr.  William  Pick,  of  York,  England,  published  "A. 
Careful  Collection  of  all  the  Pedigrees  it  was  then  Possible  to 
Obtain,"  thus  antedating  Mr.  Weatherby's  "Introduction"  by 
five  years.  In  1785  Mr.  Pick  had  commenced  the  publication  of 
a  racing  calendar  called  "The  Sportsman  and  Breeder's  Vade 
Mecum,"  which  was  continued  a  good  many  years.  These  little 
annual  volumes  were  well  received,  and  they  were  the  forerunners 
of  Pick's  Turf  Register,  the  first  volume  of  which  was  brought 
out  in  1703.  This  was  the  same  year  that  the  first  volume  of 
Weatherby 's  Stud  Book  appeared,  and  there  was  a  sharp  rivalry 
between  the  two  authors,  not  merely  as  two  men,  but  as  repre- 
senting two  divisions  of  the  country.  Mr.  Pick  was  a  Yorkshire 
man  and  Mr.  Weatherby  was  a  Londoner.  Yorkshire  claimed  to 
be  the  "race-horse  region"  of  England,  and  the  Southrons  wera 
ready  to  fight  rather  than  concede  that  claim.  This  rivalry  sur- 
vived two  or  three  generations  of  racing  men,  and  it  is  a  question 


84  THE    HOBSE    OF    AMERICA. 

whether  it  lias  yet  subsided.     In  the  north  Pick  was  the  author- 
ity and  in  the  south,  Weather  by. 

These  two  men  worked  on  different  plans,  and  each  had  its  ad- 
vantages. Pick  limited  his  labors  to  the  great  animals  of  the 
past,  and  took  them  up  in  chronological  order,  giving  a  brief 
sketch  of  the  history  and  performances  of  each.  This  plan  re- 
quired space,  and  when  he  had  completed  his  first  volume  of  five 
hundred  and  twenty-eight  pages  he  had  only  reached  the  close  of 
1763.  The  second  volume,  bringing  the  work  down  to  the  close 
of  1772,  made  its  appearance  in  1805.  Mr.  Pick  did  not  live  to 
continue  the  work,  and  it  fell  into  the  hands  of  Mr.  R.  Johnson, 
who  brought  out  the  third  volume  in  1822,  which  continued  the 
chronological  order  to  the  close  of  1782.  After  the  lapse  of  forty- 
five  years,  namely  1867,  the  fourth  volume  appeared  under  Mr. 
Johnson's  name,  bringing  the  work  to  the  close  of  1792,  and  I  am 
not  aware  that  the  work  has  been  continued.  These  four  volumes 
contained  much  that  cannot  be  found  elsewhere,  and  are  very 
valuable. 

When  we  come  to  study  these  assemblages  of  impossible  things 
put  together  and  called  pedigrees,  we  begin  to  realize  the  abso- 
lute rottenness  of  the  alleged  pedigrees  of  that  whole  early  period. 
Take,  for  instance,  the  case  of  the  horse  called  the  Bald  Galloway. 
He  bore  this  name  because  he  had  a  bald  face,  and  was  of  the 
Galloway  breed.  This  Galloway  breed  took  its  name  from  the 
old  Province  of  Galloway,  in  the  southwestern  part  of  Scotland. 
They  were  small,  active  horses  and  were  famous  for  many  genera- 
tions as  a  breed  of  pacers.  It  has  been  said  that  the  last  pacers  in 
Great  Britain  were  found  in  Galloway.  This  horse,  Bald  Gallo- 
way, was  foaled  some  time  about  1708  and  was  famous  as  a  fast 
race  horse  till  he  trained  off  at  five  years  old.  I  think  there  is 
no  doubt  about  his  being  a  genuine  Galloway,  and  if  so  how 
could  he  have  a  pedigree  all  of  foreign  blood  and  ending  in  a 
" Royal  Mare?"  This  Galloway  horse  was  the  sire  of  the  famous 
Roxana,  that  produced  Lath  and  his  full  brother  Cade,  that 
made  the  early  reputation  of  the  great  Godolphin  Arabian.  I 
will  ask  my  readers  to  refer  to  the  Ourwen  Bay  Barb,  No.  11, 
near  the  commencement  of  this  chapter.  This  was  one  of  the 
very  best  of  all  the  Barbs  imported,  and  his  origin  and  history  are 
given  with  unusual  fullness,  as  well  as  an  enumeration  of  the  best 
of  his  get.  In  examining  this  enumeration  it  will  be  seen  that  a 
good  number  of  his  best  foals  were  out  of  Galloway  mares  and 


THE   ENGLISH   KACE   HORSE.  85 

are  called  "Galloways."  Brocklesby  Betty  was  one  of  the  great 
mares  of  her  day,  and  the  Stud  Book  says  that  "as  a  runner,  she 
was  thought  to  be  the  superior  of  any  horse  or  mare  of  her  time." 
She  was  foaled  1711,  was  got  by  Curwen  Bay  Barb  ancl  out  of  Mr. 
Leedes'  Hobby  Mare.  She  was  a  brood  mare  before  she  was 
trained,  and  her  performances  were  soon  after  the  establishment 
of  the  Racing  Calendars,  which  show  her  great  superiority.  The 
"Hobbies"  were  a  breed  of  Irish  pacing  horses  that  had  been 
noted  for  more  than  a  hundred  years,  on  both  sides  of  the  Irish 
channel,  as  saddle  horses,  hunters,  and  runners.  The  theory 
that  these  "Irish  Hobbies"  were  descended  from  the  horses  on 
board  one  of  the  ships  of  the  Spanish  Armada,  that  was  wrecked 
on  the  Irish  coast,  is  purely  fanciful,  for  they  were  known  as  a 
breed  long  before  the  Spanish  Armada  was  projected.  The  Hob- 
bies were  larger  and  better  formed,  as  a  rule,  than  the  Galloways, 
and  more  highly  esteemed.  These  illustrations  of  the  influence 
and  power  of  indigenous  blood  in  the  formation  of  the  breed 
known  throughout  the  world  as  the  English  race  horse  might  be 
extended  indefinitely,  but  let  these  suffice.  With  the  "'Gallo- 
ways" and  the  "Hobbies,"  well  known  to  our  ancestors  two  hun- 
dred years  ago  as  established  breeds  or  tribes  of  horses,  we  cannot 
avoid  the  conclusion  that  they  were  very  prodigal  of  fancy  and 
very  economical  of  truth  when  they  attempted  to  clothe  Bald 
Galloway,  Leedes'  Hobby,  etc.,  in  foreign  pedigrees  to  make 
them  fashionable.  Aside  from  the  matters  of  evidence  here  intro- 
duced going  to  show  the  composite  material  entering  into  the 
constitution,  structure  and  instincts  of  the  race  horse  as  he  is  to- 
day, there  is  another  that  plays  a  very  prominent  part  in  the 
combination.  When  we  see  a  race  horse  fourteen  hands  high, 
and  another  of  equally  pure  blood  standing  beside  him  seventeen 
hands  high,  we  naturally  wonder,  and  ask,  Why  this  difference 
in  size?  The  Turk,  the  Barb,  the  Hobby,  the  Galloway,  and  in- 
deed all  the  old  English  racing  stock,  were  very  small,  scarcely 
averaging  fourteen  hands.  After  we  have  made  every  allowance 
for  a  salubrious  climate  and  a  generous  and  unstinted  dietary  we 
must  concede  a  gradual  increase  of  growth,  but  these  things  fail  to 
account  for  a  difference  of  twelve  inches  in  the  height  of  two 
horses  bred  in  the  same  lines  for  untold  generations.  The  con- 
clusion seems  to  be  inevitable  that  there  were  big  horses  as  well 
as  little  ones  in  the  original  combination  of  ancestors.  From 
these  diverse  sources  of  his  inheritance,  it  becomes  plain  to  the 


86  THE   HOUSE   OF   AMERICA. 

mind  of  every  one  that  the  English  race  horse  is  thoroughly  com- 
posite in  the  blood  he  inherits,  and  it  is  beyond  the  powers  of 
analysis  to  determine  whether  one  element  did  more  than  another 
in  making  him  the  fastest  running  horse  in  the  world. 

While  it  might  be  forcibly,  if  not  conclusively,  argued  that  the 
native  English  horse  had  in  him  all  the  elements  necessary  to  the 
development  of  a  breed  of  race  horses  as  great  as  the  breed  of 
our  own  day,  there  is  one  fact  ever  present  to  the  senses  which 
goes  to  show  that  the  influence  of  exotic  blood  was  very  wide  and 
very  powerful  in  controlling  the  action  of  the  race  horse.     The 
popular  and  prevailing  pacing  action  of  the  Hobbies,  the  Gal- 
loways, and  other  hunting,  racing  and  saddle  tribes  was  com- 
pletely wiped  out  more  than  a  hundred  years  ago.     Any  attempt 
to  account  for  this  revolution  in  the  gait  of  the  English  horse  as 
a  fancy  of  fashion,  or  on  the  introduction  of  wheeled  vehicles, 
fails  to  satisfy  the  understanding.     In  the  first  half  of  the  seven- 
teenth  century   pacers   were   popular,  common,    and   abounded 
everywhere.     In  the  second  half  of  the  eighteenth  century  not 
one  could  be  found  in  air  Britain,  "from  Land's  End  to  John 
O'G-roat's  House."     Of  all  the  facts  that  are  known  and  estab- 
lished in  the  history  of  the  English  horse,  the  wiping  out  of  the 
pacer  is  the  most  striking  and  significant.     This  exterminating 
process  was  not  limited  to  the  families  that  were  intended  for 
hunting  or  racing  purposes,  but  extended  to  all  types  and  breeds 
of  English  horses.     The  little  English  pacers  that  had  been  the 
favorites  of  kings  and  princes  and  nobles  for  so  many  centuries 
were  submerged  in  the  streams  of  Saracenic  blood  that  flowed  in 
upon  them,  and  their  only  legitimate  descendants  left  upon  the 
face   of  the   earth    found    homes    in    the    American    colonies. 
Their  blood  is  one  of  the  principal  elements  in  the  foundation  of 
the  English  race  horse,  but  the  "lateral  action"  in  his  progeny 
was  esteemed  a  bar-sinister  on  the  escutcheon  of  the  stallion,  and 
it  was  sought  to  be  covered  up  with  something  more  fashionable 
in  name.     The  old  saddle  horses  of  England  were  not  all  pacers, 
although  that  habit  of  action  was  very  general  among  them,  and 
in  some  families  it  was  more  uniform  and   confirmed  than  in 
others,  and  my  authority  for  this  conclusion  will  be  found  in  the 
detailed  account  of  the  horses  brought   from    England  to  the 
American  colonies  early  in  the  seventeenth  century.     It  is  evi- 
dent that  from  the  day  the  blood  of  the  Saracenic  horse  was 
brought  in  contact  with  that  of  the  indigenous  saddle  horse,  they 


THE   ENGLISH    RACE   HORSE.  87 

-were  antagonistic,  if  in  nothing  more,  certainly  in  the  habit  of 
action.  The  one  never  moved  in  the  lateral  action  and  the  other 
Tery  generally  adopted  that  form  of  progression  because  it  was 
his  inheritance.  What  might  have  been  the  result  if  left  to  the 
laws  of  "natural  selection,"  it  would  be  impossible  to  decide; 
but  with  the  dictates  of  profit  to  the  master,  the  mandates  of 
fashion,  and  above  all  the  accepted  teachings  of  the  Duke  of 
Newcastle,  the  little  pacer  had  no  "friends  at  court,"  and  all  he 
could  do  was  to  get  out  of  the  way,  with  his  lateral  action.  In 
our  own  country  and  under  the  observation  of  everybody  the 
pacer  shows  great  tenacity  to  his  long-inherited  habit  of  action, 
and  although  buried  in  non-pacing  blood,  as  supposed,  for  two  or 
three  generations,  the  pace  is  liable  to  appear  again,  at  any  time. 
So  it  was,  doubtless  in  English  experiences,  but  as  the  revolution 
was  not  retarded  by  the  development  of  pacing  speed,  in  one 
hundred  years  from  the  restoration,  in  1660,  there  was  no  longer 
a  pacer  on  British  soil. 

When  the  first  Mr.  Weatherby  assumed  the  task  of  making  and 
keeping  a  registry  of  English  race  horses,  he  seems  to  have  had 
only  a  very  faint  conception  of  the  magnitude  of  the  undertak- 
ing. The  first  volume  of  his  "General  Stud  Book"  was  published 
in  1803,  and  when  it  appeared  it  was  found  to  contain  so  many 
things  that  were  not  true  that  the  necessary  work  of  revision 
.and  excision  reduced  its  contents  fearfully.  In  these  elimina- 
tions he  started  in  with  a  free  hand,  as  is  shown  by  comparison 
with  later  editions,  but  soon  found  that  his  book  was  disappear- 
ing very  rapidly,  and  not  much  of  it  would  be  left,  if  he  did  not 
stay  his  hand.  At  this  point  he  seems  to  have  adopted  some 
new  rule,  unfortunately,  either  of  evidence  or  of  date,  probably 
the  latter,  for  his  work  discloses  the  fact  that  he  declined  all  re- 
sponsibility for  pedigrees  as  they  came  to  him,  of  an  earlier 
period  than  about  1780.  Beyond  that  date  nearly  all  the  crude 
-and  impossible  things  of  fiction  were  allowed  to  remain  and  are 
thus  propagated  as  true,  down  to  our  own  day.  There  was  one 
rule,  however,  adopted  very  early  in  the  management  of  this 
compilation  that  saved  it  from  degeneracy,  and  that  was  the 
difficulty  of  getting  into  it.  In  all  its  history,  from  the  begin- 
ning, it  has  been  a  kind  of  "close  corporation,"  and  the  animals 
in  the  volume  of  the  last  year  are  almost  uniformly  descended 
from  the  animals  to  be  found  in  the  first  volume.  The  applica- 
tion of  this  rule,  no  doubt,  worked  an  injustice  in  very  many  cases, 


88  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

but  it  made  the  English  race  horse  a  BREED,  pre-eminent  above- 
all  other  horses  for  his  unequaled  speed  as  a  running  horse. 
This  general  rule  restricting  admissions  to  the  descendants  of 
such  as  had  places  in  preceding  volumes  seems  to  have  been 
followed  and  maintained  with  a  good  share  of  rigidity,  by  the 
different  generations  of  the  Weatherby  family,  in  whose  hands 
the  compilation  still  remains.  Whatever  may  have  been  the  ratio 
of  fables  and  forgeries  in  the  first  volume,  they  were  there 
compacted  and  neither  the  Weatherbys  nor  the  breeders  have 
been  much  annoyed  with  them  since.  The  plan  of  the  Stud 
Book  itself  is  very  unsatisfactory  to  the  careful  student,  for  the 
reason  that  it  admits  of  no  details  of  breeder,  owner,  etc.,  that 
are  of  vital  importance  in  tracing  and  identifying  an  unknown  or 
disputed  pedigree.  While  the  plan  is  very  desirable  and  effect- 
ive in  placing  the  produce  of  mares  underneath  the  dams,  it  is 
very  defective  in  relation  to  breeders,  and  subsequent  owners. 
Unless  the  identity  of  the  animal  can  be  traced  and  established 
by  the  records,  the  pedigree  is  always  doubtful.  But  notwith- 
standing the  unsatisfactory  plan  of  its  construction,  it  has  been 
honestly  compiled,  and  we  may  safely  accept  its  contents,  back 
as  far  as  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth  century,  when  Mr. 
Weatherby  began  his  work;  but  when  we  reach  the  period  of  th& 
eighteenth  century,  facts,  fables  and  frauds  are  so  inextricably 
mixed  that  whatever  we  accept  must  be  cum  grano  salis.  Be- 
yond that  period  Mr.  Weatherby  furnishes  nothing  but  the  wild- 
est fancies  and  traditions  shaped  up  by  those  contributing  them 
with  a  view  to  lengthen  a  pedigree  and  a  price  accordingly.  All 
that  we  can  ever  know  of  the  horses  of  that  period  we  must- 
gather  from  the  little  snatches  dropped  by  contemporaneous  his- 
torians. 

In  establishing  his  "General  Stud  Book,17  Mr.  Weatherby's 
work  may  be  compared  to  the  building  of  an  embankment  around 
a  great  field  which  contained  all  the  race  horses  of  the  realm.  They 
were  of  all  colors,  all  markings  and  all  sizes,  except  the  monster 
cart  horse  and  the  diminutive  Shetland.  They  had  all  raced  or 
possessed  blood  that  had  raced,  and  they  all  had  pedigrees  of 
various  lengths  and  various  degrees  of  reliability.  They  all 
walked  and  trotted  and  galloped,  and  there  was  not  a  pacer 
among  them,  for  the  last  pacer  had  disappeared  from  England 
probably  fifty  years  before  this.  The  antagonism  of  the  Saracenic 
horse  had  triumphed,  and  that  antagonism  was  bred  in  the  blood 


THE   ENGLISH   RACE   HORSE.  89 

rand  bone  of  every  animal  in  the  field.  They  were  placed  there 
to  be  inter-bred  and  to  produce  race  horses.  Every  one  of  the 
thousand  owners  was  anxious  to  produce  a  great  winner,  and  he 
was  left  to  the  exercise  of  his  own  fancy  and  judgment  as  to 
what  cross  would  be  most  likely  to  prove  successful,  and  to  vindi- 
cate his  superior  intelligence.  With  all  experimenting  outside 
of  the  breed  practically  barred,  the  instincts  of  the  breed  ripened 
and  intensified  until  its  representatives  are  able  to  beat  the  fleet- 
est in  the  world  at  the  gallop,  but  they  could  neither  walk  fast 
nor  trot  fast.  It  is  doubtful  whether  any  person  in  the  world 
has  ever  seen  a  true-bred  race  horse  that  could  trot  a  mile  in 
four  minutes.  At  this  gait  they  show  no  aptness  nor  speed  what- 
ever. By  breeding  to  fit  the  modern  methods  of  racing,  the 
speed  of  the  race  horse  has  been  greatly  increased,  for  short  dis- 
tances, but  his  stamina  and  endurance  no  longer  command  ad- 
miration as  in  former  generations. 

In  the  latter  half  of  the  last  century  there  were  a  good  many 
excellent  trotters  in  England,  but  the  further  we  get  away  from 
the  blood  of  the  old  English  pacer,  the  fewer  the  trotters  we 
find,  until  at  last  there  are  none  at  all.  It  seems  to  be  true  of 
all  countries  that  where  there  are  no  pacers  there  are  no  trot- 
ters. It  was  not  the  purpose  nor  wish  of  the  English  people  to 
banish  the  trotter,  but  when  the  pacer  was  banished  the  trotter 
soon  followed  him. 


CHAPTER  VII. 

THE  AMERICAN  RACE  HORSE. 

Antiquity  of  American  racing — First  race  course  at  Hempstead  Plain,  1665 — 
Racing-  in  Virginia,  1677 — Conditions  of  early  races — Early  so-called 
Arabian  importations — The  marvelous  tradition  of  Lindsay's  "Arabian" — 
English  race  horses  first  imported  about  1750 — The  old  colonial  stock  as  a 
basis — First  American  turf  literature — Skinner's  American  Turf  Register 
and  Sporting  Magazine,  1829 — CadwalladerR.  Colden's  Sporting  Magazine 
short-lived  but  valuable — The  original  Spirit  of  the  Times — Porter's 
Spirit  of  the  Times—  Wilkes'  Spirit  of  the  Times,  1859— Edgar's  Stud  Book 
— Wallace's  Stud  Book — Bruce's  Stud  Book — Their  history,  methods,  and 
value — Summing  up  results,  showing  that  success  Las  followed  breeding 
to  individuals  and  families  that  could  run  and  not  to  individuals  and 
families  that  could  not  run,  whatever  their  blood. 

HORSES  were  kept  for  running,  and  horse  racing  was  a  com- 
mon amusement  in  some  of  the  American  Colonies  for  about  a 
hundred  years  before  the  first  English  race  horses  were  imported. 
This  embraces  a  century  of  horse  history  that,  hitherto,  has  been 
practically  unexplored  and  unknown.  For  the  details  of  what  I 
have  been  able  to  glean  of  this  neglected  and  unknown  century 
my  readers  are  referred  to  the  chapters  on  the  different  colonies. 
The  first  racing  in  this  country  of  which  we  have  any  historical 
knowledge  was  organized  by  G-overnor  Nicolls.  In  1664  the- 
Dutch  surrendered  the  province  of  New  Netherlands  to  the  Eng- 
lish, and  the  next  autumn,  1665,  the  new  race  course  at  Hemp- 
stead  Plains  was  inaugurated  by  the  new  governor  of  the  colony. 
This  course  was  named  Newmarket,  after  the  famous  English 
course,  and  G-overnor  Nicolls'  successors  continued  to  offer 
purses  on  this  course  for  many  years,  and  after  a  time  there  were 
two  regular  meetings  held  there,  spring  and  autumn.  Owing  to 
the  distance  of  this  course  from  the  city,  other  courses,  near  at 
hand,  were  soon  constructed  and  racing  of  all  kinds  and  at  all 
gaits  held  high  carnival.  The  principal  prizes  were  called  "Sub- 
scription Purses,"  the  distance  almost  invariably  two  miles,  and 
the  weight  carried  ten  stone.  The  horses  that  ran  were  known 


THE   AMERICAN    RACE    HORSE.  91 

as  "Dutch  horses/'  and  were  descended  from  the  original  stock 
brought  from  Utrecht,  in  Holland.  They  were  larger  than  the 
English  horses,  and  brought  better  prices,  although  the  latter 
were  esteemed  more  highly  for  their  saddle  gaits.  I  think  the 
Dutch  horses,  originally,  had  no  natural  pacers  among  them,  but 
for  the  pleasures  and  uses  of  the  saddle  they  were  inter-bred  with 
the  English  horses  and  the  mixed  blood  soon  produced  many 
pacers.  It  is  probable  also  that  this  mixture  increased  the  speed 
of  the  whole  tribe.  Thus  racing  continued  with  but  few  inter- 
ruptions and  without  any  known  changes  in  the  rules  or  condi- 
tions governing  performances,  except  that  after  fifty  years  or  more 
the  weight  to  be  carried  was  reduced  from  ten  stone  to  eight 
stone.  In  the  year  1751,  which  was  eighty-six  years  after  Gover- 
nor Nicolls  had  established  the  Newmarket  course  on  Long 
Island,  we  find  the  following  significant  condition  inserted  in 
the  terms  of  entrance  to  the  races,  for  the  first  time:  "Free  to 
any  horse,  mare,  or  gelding  bred  in  America."  The  simple 
meaning  of  this  new  condition  was  to  "head  off"  the  scheme  of 
some  "sharp"  fellows  who  were,  probably,  then  on  the  ocean 
with  two  or  three  English  race  horses,  witb  which  they  expected 
to  "gobble  up"  whatever  stakes  or  purses  came  within  their 
reach. 

The  first  record  we  have  of  racing  in  Virginia  is  to  be  found  in 
the  court  records  of  Henrico  County,  in  the  year  1677 — twelve 
years  after  the  establishment  of  racing  in  New  York.  I^or  fuller 
particulars  of  this,  the  reader  is  referred  to  the  chapter  on  that 
colony.  The  Virginians  were  a  horse-racing  people  from  the 
start,  and  it  is  impossible  to  tell  how  long  before  racing  first  com- 
menced, but  probably  just  as  soon  as  any  two  neighbors  met,  each 
owning  a  horse,  a  few  hundred  pounds  of  tobacco  were  put  up 
the  next  day,  to  make  it  interesting,  in  determining  which  was 
the  faster.  This  racing  feeling  was  not  confined  to  neighbors 
nor  to  neighborhoods,  but  it  pervaded  the  whole  colony,  and  the 
people  of  every  county  had  their  annual  and  semi-annual  meet- 
ings, which  everybody  attended.  Their  methods  of  handicap- 
ping will  strike  the  present  generation  as  somewhat  peculiar.  In 
their  advertisements  of  the  meetings,  such  language  as  the  fol- 
lowing was  very  common:  "Sized  horses  to  carry  one  hundred" 
and  forty  pounds  and  Galloways  to  be  allowed  weight  for 
inches."  From  this  we  learn  that  the  tribe  of  little  Scotch  pacers 
were  still  to  the  fore  on  this  side  of  the  water  and  that  they 


D2  THE    HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

were  just  as  fleet  as  the  larger  horses,  provided  the  weight  was 
graduated  to  their  inches.  There  was  one  feature  in  these  race 
meetings  that  will  be  a  surprise  to  many  of  my  readers,  as  it  was 
to  myself,  and  that  is  the  fact  that  at  most  of  these  meetings 
there  was  one  four-mile  race.  Smaller  prizes  were  run  for  by 
horses  classed  as  to  size,  and  it  may  be  noted  that  there  was  one 
class  "not  exceeding  thirteen  hands."  At  these  meetings  the 
distance  never  seems  to  have  been  less  than  one  mile,  while  on 
the  southern  border  of  the  colony  and  in  North  Carolina,  quarter 
racing  was  very  popular  and  very  common  from  the  earliest  dates, 
and  it  was  kept  up  through  the  greater  part  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  For  a  fuller  account  of  the  racing  of  those  early  days 
the  reader  is  referred  to  the  chapter  on  Virginia. 

In  this  old  English,  Irish  and  Scottish  blood,  full  of  the  pacing 
element,  which  we  may  now  call  "native"  blood,  we  have  the 
real  foundation  upon  which  the  English  race  horse  was  bred  and 
from  which  has  come  the  approximate  if  not  the  complete  equal 
of  the  highest  type  of  the  English  horse,  in  both  speed  and 
stamina.  The  English  and  the  American  race  horse  came  from 
the  same  source  and  possess  the  same  blood,  with  this  trifling 
distinction — the  native  mares  in  England  were  bred  to  horses  of 
exotic,  Saracenic  origin,  while  the  native  mares  of  America  were 
bred  to  the  descendants  of  that  native-exotic  combination. 
Hence,  with  the  original  maternal  ancestry  of  the  same  blood, 
the  combined  and  improved  English  descendant  of  that  blood 
became  the  paternal  ancestor  of  the  American  race  horse.  We 
must  not  forget  that  this  "paternal  ancestor"  had  been  the  re- 
sult of  crossing  and  recrossing,  selecting,  breeding  and  develop- 
ing for  nearly  a  hundred  years,  and  that  he  was,  therefore,  a  far 
better  horse  and  far  more  prepotent  as  a  sire  than  the  produce 
of  the  first  cross  made  under  the  direction  of  the  Duke  of  New- 
castle. We  must  not  ignore  the  fact  that  while  there  were  many 
stallions  brought  over  in  the  early  days  there  were  also  a  few 
mares,  but  they  were  so  few  in  number  that  their  influence  was 
hardly  appreciable  in  the  new  breed  to  be  established.  Saracenic 
blood  was  touched  very  sparingly  in  the  colonial  days,  as  even 
the  names  of  not  more  than  three  or  four  have  been  preserved 
in  history.  The  only  one  of  that  period  fully  identified  was 
named  Bashaw  and  was  kept  on  Long  Island  about  the  year  1768. 
Like  all  the  others,  he  was  called  an  Arabian,  but  according  to 
the  showing  of  his  advertisement  he  was  bred  by  the  Emperor  of 


THE   AMERICAN"    RACE   HORSE.  93 

Morocco,  and  was  not  an  Arabian.  Of  the  later  period  and  com- 
ing down  to  about  1860  there  are  twenty-five  or  thirty  that  have 
been  called  "Arabians."  Near  the  head  of  the  list  stands  one 
called  "Arab  Barb"  or  "Black  Arabian  Barb."  He  was  claimed 
to  be  an  imported  Barb  from  Algiers,  and  was  seventeen  hands 
high. "and  coarse  in  proportion."  Many  other  so-called  "im- 
porters" were  equally  absurd  and  dishonest  in  their  claims,  but 
there  horses  all  passed  as  genuine  "Arabians."  Out  of  the 
whole  number  called  "Arabians"  not  more  than  five  or  six  seem 
to  have  had  a  shadow  of  right  to  the  name,  and  these  exceptions 
were  practically  restricted  to  the  animals  imported  by  Mr.  A. 
Keene  Richards,  of  Kentucky.  That  each  and  all  of  these  ex- 
ceptions were  irredeemable  failures  is  a  fact  well  known  to  all 
intelligent  horsemen.  This  motley  crew  of  "Arabian"  importa- 
tions came  from  all  the  countries  bordering  on  the  Mediterranean, 
except  Arabia,  were  all  called  "Arabians,"  and  they  were  all  flat 
disappointments  both  as  race  horses  and  as  producers  of  race 
horses. 

Out  of  this  list  of  thirty-five  or  forty  so-called  Arabian  horses, 
there  is  one  that  requires  special  mention,  not  only  because  a  cor- 
rection may  be  made  in  his  history,  but  because  I  have  frequently 
spoken  of  him  as  the  only  Arabian  that  had  left  any  mark  upon 
the  horse  stock  of  the  country.  Lindsay's  Arabian,  as  he  was 
called,  was  a  grey  horse  and  represented  to  be  over  fifteen  hands . 
high.  The  story  is  that  he  was  a  Barb  and  had  been  presented 
to  the  commander  of  a  British  man-of-war,  when  a  colt,  by  the 
ruler  of  one  of  the  Barbary  States,  as  an  expression  of  gratitude 
to  the  captain  for  having  saved  the  life  of  his  son.  The  captain 
sailed  away  for  a  South  American  port,  and  while  lying  there  he 
took  his  present  ashore  to  let  him  have  a  little  exercise.  The 
colt  was  given  the  free  range  of  a  lumber-yard,  as  the  story  goes, 
and  in  his  playfulness  a  pile  of  lumber  fell  upon  him  and  broke 
three  of  his  legs.  The  British  officer  was  greatly  grieved  at  his 
loss  and  proposed  to  put  the  colt  out  of  misery  by  knocking  him 
on  the  head.  There  happened  to  be  an  American  trading  vessel 
in  port  and  the  skipper  "'allowed  if  he  had  that  critter  on  his 
vessel  he  could  save  him."  The  officer  at  once  gave  him  to  the 
skipper  and  told  him  his  history.  Yankee  ingenuity  and  thrift 
soon  got  him  aboard  the  trader  and  he  was  swung  up  and  his 
legs  properly  bandaged.  The  surgical  treatment  was  good,  the 
bones  knit,  and  in  due  time  the  vessel  arrived  at  New  London,. 


94  THE    HORtfE    OF    AMERICA. 

and  the  colt  was  taken  to  the  vicinity  of  Hartford.  Just  where 
this  story  originated  it  is  not  possible  now  to  say,  nor  do  I  know 
that  it  ever  had  currency  in  Connecticut,  but  it  was  certainly 
rehearsed  and  probably  believed  in  Maryland.  He  was  owned  by 
Colonel  Wyllis  of  Hartford,  and  was  advertised  in  1770  under  the 
single  name  of  Eanger,  and  described  as  "a  fine  English  stallion 
of  the  Barbary  breed,  bred  in  England."  From  this  it  would 
appear  that  nothing  was  then  known  of  his  romantic  history. 
As  a  part  of  his  Maryland  history  it  was  said  that  General  Wash- 
ington's attention  had  been  attracted  to  a  body  of  Connecticut 
cavalry  by  the  excellence  of  their  horses,  and  at  his  instance 
Captain  Lindsay  bought  Ranger,  because  he  was  the  sire  of  many 
of  those  horses,  and  took  him  to  Maryland,  where  he  was  ever 
afterward  known  as  '"Lindsay's  Arabian."  The  story  of  the 
indorsement  of  Washington  made  an  excellent  stallion  card,  and 
it  is  not  necessary  that  we  should  inquire  into  it  too  closely,  for 
the  dates  might  raise  a  question.  The  horse  passed  from  Colonel 
Wyllis  to  James  Howard,  of  Windham,  and  was  advertised  by 
him  as  "'The  Imported  Arabian  Horse  called  The  Ranger  to 
stand  at  his  stable  the  season  of  1778."  Hence  we  must  conclude 
that  he  was  not  taken  to  the  South  before  the  season  of  1779,  or 
possibly  later.  Then,  as  now,  to  catch  the  popular  fancy,  North 
and  South,  the  horse  is  no  longer  an  "English  stallion  of  the 
Barbary  breed"  but  an  "Imported  Arabian  Horse."  His  cross 
was  well  esteemed  in  his  day,  and  it  has  held  its  place  in  the  esti- 
mation of  all  the  experienced  horsemen  as  a  good  cross  in  an 
old  pedigree.  We  now  see  that  he  was  bred  in  England,  that  he 
was  got  by  a  Barb  horse  or  the  son  of  a  Barb  horse,  and  that  it  is 
not  probable  there  was  a  single  drop  of  Arabian  blood  in  his 
veins.  This  little  sketch  will  serve  to  illustrate  the  methods, 
general  and  particular,  that  were  invariably  used  to  place  a  ficti- 
tious value  upon  the  so-called  imported  "Arabians."  In  no 
other  department  of  human  knowledge  has  there  been  such  a 
universal  and  persistent  habit  of  misrepresenting  the  truth  of 
history  as  in  matters  relating  to  the  horse.  It  seems  to  have 
been,  and  still  is,  a  kind  of  pyschical  contagion  that  has  been 
generating  dishonesty  and  a  habit  of  lying  in  the  minds  of  the 
great  body  of  horsemen  for  the  past  two  hundred  and  fifty  years. 
If  a  horse  is  brought  from  Turkey,  or  Syria,  or  Egypt,  or  Spain,  or 
Morocco,  or  any  of  the  Barbary  States,  he  is  at  once  called  an 
<k Arabian."  This  is  worse  than  a  misnomer,  for  it  is  an  essential 


THE    AMERICAN    RACE    HORSE.  95 

untruth,  and  its  universal  use  does  not  redeem  it  from  its  es- 
sence of  deception  and  fraud.  It  must  be  conceded,  however, 
that  this  deception  may  have  sprung  from  bad  teaching  and 
ignorance  rather  than  from  a  depraved  moral  sense,  for  many 
people,  as  well  as  the  poets  and  the  novelists,  may  have  concluded 
that  as  the  nations  named  above  got  their  religion  from  Arabia, 
so  they  got  their  horse  stock  from  the  same  country,  and  thus 
the  horses  brought  from  Turkey,  or  Syria,  or  Egypt,  or  Spain, 
or  Morocco,  or  any  of  the  Barbary  States,  are  descendants  of  the 
Arabian  horse  and  thus  entitled  to  the  name  " Arabian."  This 
seems  to  be  the  only  theory  upon  which  this  universal  misrepre- 
sentation can  be  palliated.  Let  us  repeat  a  sentence  or  two  here, 
to  show  what  history  reveals  on  this  point.  Strabo  says  there 
were  no  horses  in  Arabia  at  the  beginning  of  the  Christian  era. 
Philostorgius  says  that  in  the  year  356,  two  hundred  "well-bred" 
(Jappadocian  horses  were  sent  as  a  present  to  the  prince  of 
Yemen,  by  the  Emperor  Constantius.  These  were  the  first 
horses  in  Arabia.  In  the  days  of  Mohammed  horses  were  ex- 
ceedingly scarce  in  Arabia,  and  they  have  remained  so  to  the 
present  time.  The  horse  is  an  expensive  exotic  in  Arabia,  as  he 
is  never  used  for  any  domestic  purpose,  nor  for  any  other  pur- 
pose except  robbery  or  display.  For  all  domestic  and  commercial 
uses  the  camel  is  far  better.  All  the  countries  named  above  were 
abundantly  supplied  with  horses,  at  least  eight  hundred  or  a 
thousand  years  before  there  were  any  horses  in  Arabia.  The 
Moslems  got  their  religion  from  Arabia,  but  not  their  horses. 
This  topic  is  more  fully  discussed  in  the  chapter  on  the  Arabian 
horse. 

The  importation  of  English  race  horses  to  this  side  of  the 
water  commenced  about  the  year  1750,  and  that  being  the  mid- 
dle of  the  last  century  it  is  easy  to  remember  the  date  when  the 
line  was  drawn  between  the  old  and  the  new  elements  appearing 
on  the  race  course.  The  following  six  animals  were  brought  over 
within  a  year  or  two  of  that  date — Monkey,  Traveller,  Dabster, 
Childers,  Badger,  and  Janus.  A  few  others  might  be  named, 
but  some  at  least  are  mythical.  Of  those  here  named,  Traveller 
was  the  great  horse.  Janus  became  the  progenitor  of  a  tribe  of 
very  fast  quarter  horses,  and  although  he  did  not  found  that 
tribe,  which  had  been  in  existence  for  a  hundred  years  on  the 
border  line  between  Virginia  and  North  Carolina,  he  doubtless 
improved  it.  Monkey  was  twenty-two  years  old  when  he  came 


96  THE   HOUSE    OF   AMEEICA. 

and  did  not  live  long.  The  whole  number  imported  into  all  the 
colonies  before  the  war  of  the  Revolution  counts  up  to  about  fifty, 
and  some  of  these  are  practically  unknown,  and  a  few  of  them 
were  wholly  fictitious.  Maryland,  I  think,  was  first  in  the  field 
of  importations,  and  then  followed  Virginia,  New  York,  and 
North  Carolina.  Possibly  the  very  earliest  importations  were- 
made  in  South  Carolina,  but  there  is  not  much  evidence  that 
those  importations  were  utilized  to  any  extent  for  racing  pur- 
poses, and  hence  we  know  but  little  of  the  doings  of  that  colony  * 
till  a  later  date.  There  were  not  more  than  about  twenty  mares- 
of  English  race-horse  blood  imported,  in  the  quarter  of  a  century 
preceding  the  Revolution,  into  all  the  colonies.  As  many  of 
these  animals  of  both  sexes  were  stolen  or  destroyed  during  the 
war,  we  can  approximate  with  some  degree  of  certainty  the  great 
reduction  in  this  producing  force  by  the  time  the  war  ended  and 
importations  again  commenced. 

Now,  we  have  before  us  the  old  colonial  running  stock  that 
had  been  tested  in  many  a  battle  and  found  able  to  cover  the 
distance  of  two  to  four  miles,  and  we  have  also  the  new  running 
stock  thkt  had  never  been  asked  to  go  any  further,  but  we  have 
no  actual,  authentic  and  reliable  knowledge  of  the  comparative 
speed   of  the  two   classes.     There   were   no   stop   watches    nor 
records  of  time  kept  in  those  days.     This  much  only  we  'know, 
that   prizes  were   offered  for  "half-breds"  for  a  few  years,   but 
when  it  was  found  that  some  of  the  half-breds  could  run  just  as 
fast  and  as  far  as  some  of  the  whole-breds,  this  class  of  prizes  was 
withdrawn.     Then  commenced  the  manufacture   of   fraudulent 
pedigrees,  for,  it  was  argued,  "How  could  an  American  horse^ 
beat  an  English  horse  unless  be  had  English  blood  and  plenty  of 
it?"     Hence,  when  a  horse  won  that  fact  was  taken  as  proof  that 
he  was  full    bred,  and  no  time  was  lost  in  investing  him  with  a. 
first-class,  pure -bred  pedigree.     This  was  a  little  onerous  on  the 
few  imported  mares  that  were  known  and  named,  as  in  the  case; 
of  imported  Mary  Gray,  for  she  had  to  produce  eleven  filly  foals 
by  imported  Jolly  Roger  in  order  to  accommodate  her  numerous 
progeny,  as  alleged,  and  how  many  more  claims  were  made  of 
the  same  pedigree  it  would  be  very  difficult  to  estimate.     When  it 
began  to  appear  a  little  awkward  to  require  Mary  Gray  to  have, 
on  paper,  more  than  eleven  filly  foals  by  Jolly  Roger,  it  was  soon 
discovered  that  it  was  less  perplexing  and  at  the  same  time  less. 
liable  to  be  "cornered"  by  saying   "dam  an  imported  English 


THE    AMERICAN    RACE   HORSE.  97 

mare."  No  doubt  there  was  a  great  deal  of  sharp  practice,  to 
say  nothing  of  cheating  and  lying,  about  horse  matters  in  Colonial 
times,  but  those  little  venialities  were  only  the  blossoms  indicat- 
ing the  mature  fruits  of  deceptions  and  frauds  that  were  to  follow 
when  pedigrees  would  be  considered  an  element  of  value  in  the 
running  horse,  and  when  every  man  would  have  the  power,  in 
fact,  to  make  and  print  his  pedigrees  to  suit  himself.  This 
brings  us  to  a  very  brief  consideration  of  what  has  been  done  in 
the  direction  of  correcting  the  frauds  of  the  past  and  preventing 
them  in  the  future. 

The  period  of  fable  and  of  falsehood  in  the  genealogy  of  the 
American  race  horse  seems  to  have  commenced  not  long  after  the 
first  importations  of  English  race  horses.  In  the  first  generations 
from  the  imported  English  horse  and  the  native  mare,  it  was  rather 
difficult  for  a  man  to  fix  up  a  pedigree  for  his  half-bred  colt  that 
would  show  him  to  be  full  bred,  but  after  forty,  fifty,  or  sixty 
years  had  elapsed  the  events  became  misty,  and  then  every  man 
exercised  the  right  to  make  his  own  pedigrees  to  suit  his  own 
fancy.  This  seems  to  have  been  the  condition  of  things  for 
many  years,  and  while  there  were  a  few  honest  men  who  would 
stick  to  the  truth,  the  great  majority  either  made  their  pedigrees 
to  suit  themselves  or  employed  some  "expert"  to  make  them  for 
them.  The  confusion  which  ensued  was  most  perplexing,  and 
the  slipshod  manner  in  which  editors  and  writers  on  the  horse 
did  their  work  was  most  discouraging.  "Whatever  was  found  in 
print  on  a  crossroads  blacksmith  shop  door  was  taken  as  authen- 
tic, because  it  was  in  print. 

In  1829  Mr.  John  S.  Skinner,  of  Baltimore,  Maryland,  com- 
menced the  publication  of  a  monthly  magazine,  entitled  "Tlie 
American  Turf  Register  and  Sporting  Magazine,"  and  as  it  really 
"filled  along-felt  want,"  it  received  a  very  encouraging  support. 
As  its  name  indicated  its  field,  it  at  once  became  the  authority  on 
sporting  events  and  the  receptacle  of  a  great  amount  of  valuable 
correspondence  on  the  horses  of  the  day,  as  well  as  the  earlier  race 
horses.  Mr.  Skinner  was  industrious  in  collecting  material  for 
his  magazine,  but  unfortunately  lie  published  whatever  was  sent 
to  him  relating  to  the  horse,  and  just  as  it  was  sent.  If  a  com- 
munication was  well  written,  no  difference  how  many  errors  of 
fact  it  might  contain,  it  never  seemed  to  occur  to  Mr.  Skinner  to 
use  his  blue  pencil.  Pedigrees  were  sent  in,  amounting  to  many 
thousands,  during  his  ownership,  with  fictitious  and  untruthful 


98  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

remote  extensions,  and  published  without  any  possibility  of  trac- 
ing the  different  crosses  to  a  known  or  responsible  source  or 
name.  H>re  was  the  opportunity  of  a  lifetime  to  "fix  up"  the 
pedigrees  of  stallions  to  suit  the  public  demand  and  the  fees 
sought  by  their  owners,  send  them  to  Mr.  Skinner,  and  have 
them  duly  spread  before  the  public  in  all  their  dishonest  finery. 
The  early  volumes  are  very  rich  in  the  accumulations  of  pedi- 
grees, such  as  they  are,  and  hence  very  valuable.  The  magazine 
received  less  and  less  attention  from  its  proprietor  each  succeed- 
ing year  and  finally  it  was  transferred  to  the  Spirit  of  the  Times, 
of  New  York,  and  died  after  an  existence  of  some  fifteen  years. 

Mr.  Cadwallader  E.  Golden,  of  New  York,  commenced  the 
publication  of  another  sporting  magazine,  that  was  of  very  great 
merit,  and  did  much  to  correct  some  of  the  errors  that  abounded 
in  Mr.  Skinner's  publication.  In  the  controversies  which  natu- 
rally sprang  up  he  had  greatly  the  advantage  of  his  adversary,  for 
he  knew  horse  history  and  Mr.  Skinner  did  not.  Mr.  Golden  was 
a  man  of  marked  ability,  and  over  the  signature  of  "An  Old 
Turfman"  he  made  himself  famous  as  a  writer.  He  hated  a 
fraud  and  wherever  he  saw  one  he  did  not  hesitate  to  hit  it.  His 
publication  was  a  large  and  expensive  one,  racing  was  then  under 
the  periodical  interdict  of  public  opinion,  and  after  about  two  or 
three  years,  and  greatly  to  the  loss  and  misfortune  of  the  truths 
of  horse  history,  the  publication  was  discontinued.  The  weekly 
press  had  no  representative  in  the  field  of  "horse  literature  and 
sporting  subjects"  until  early  in  the  thirties,  when  the  Spirit  of 
the  Times  was  founded  by  William  T.  Porter.  The  conception 
of  a  weekly  paper  devoted  to  all  kinds  of  sports,  such  as  hunting, 
fishing,  racing,  gaming,  etc.,  was  not  only  new  in  this  country, 
but  it  was  brilliant.  Mr.  Porter  was  not  only  a  gentleman  in  his 
appearance  and  manners,  but  he  had  fine  social  qualities  and  was 
a  writer  of  ability  and  polish.  Such  a  personage  would  naturally 
gather  about  him  friends  and  correspondents  that  were  congenial, 
and  very  soon  The  Spirit  of  the  Times  became  noted  as  the  organ 
of  a  great  body  of  educated  men  who  loved  sport  and  enjoyed 
wit.  It  was  the  only  publication  of  its  kind  on  the  continent, 
and  it  soon  obtained  a  very  wide  circulation.  Mr.  Porter  knew 
very  little  of  horses,  either  theoretically  or  practically,  but  ho 
was  a  ready  adapter  and  wrote  some  fine  descriptions  of  famous 
racing  contests.  His  habits  were  sportive  rather  than  indus- 
trious, hence  he  left  nothing  behind  him  of  value  to  his  friend? 


THE    AMERICAN    RACE    HORSE.  99 

or  to  the  world  ( except  the  mere  fact  that  he  was  the  founder  of 
the  first  sporting  paper  in  this  country.  In  course  of  time  the 
paper  with  all  its  belongings  became  the  property  of  John 
Richards,  the  former  pressman,  and  Mr.  Porter  had  to  look  for  a 
living  wherever  he  could  find  it.  Mr.  George  Wilkes  then  took 
him  under  his  wing,  and  started  a  new  sporting  paper  called 
Porter's  Spirit  of  the  Times.  The  use  of  this  name  carried 
with  it  the  support  of  a  good  many  friends,  but  as  he  was  not 
able  to  write  anything,  practically,  for  the  new  paper,  from  its 
very  commencement  in  September,  1856,  it  failed  to  yield  any 
support  to  Mr.  Porter,  and  not  much  to  Mr.  Wilkes  and  his 
partners.  Litigation  arose  and  Mr.  Wilkes  finally  withdrew  from 
Porter's  Spirit  of  the  Times,  and  started  Wilkes'  Spirit  of  the 
the  Times  in  September,  1859.  We  then  had  three  sporting 
papers  all  claiming  to  be  the  original  and  only  legitimate  Spirit 
of  the  Times.  Among  their  readers  they  were  distinguished  as 
the  Old  Spirit,  Porters  Spirit,  and  Wilkes'  Spirit.  The 
circulation  of  the  Old  Spirit  was  largely  in  the  Southern 
States,  and  the  war  destroyed  it,  in  1861.  Porter's  Spirit  "hew- 
ing but  little  money  and  still  less  brains,  died  about  the  same 
time.  This  left  Mr.  Wilkes  in  open  possession  of  the  field,  and 
his  remarkably  trenchant  articles  on  the  conduct  of  the  war 
gave  Wilkes'  Spirit  of  the  Times  a  very  wide  circulation,  even 
among  those  who  cared  nothing  for  sporting  matters.  At  the 
same  time  he  was  fortunate  in  securing  the  services  of  Mr. 
Charles  J.  Foster,  an  able  writer  on  horse  subjects,  and  a  very 
industrious  and  capable  man  in  managing  and  discussing  affairs 
connected  with  the  horse.  Some  years  later,  Mr.  Wilkes  dropped 
his  own  name  from  the  title  of  his  paper,  and  not  long  afterward 
he  added  twenty-five  or  thirty  years  to  its  age  by  changing  the 
numbers  so  as  to  cover  the  period  of  the  original  Spirit  of  the 
Times  founded  by  William  T.  Porter.  The  old  sporting  publica- 
tions, one  and  all,  maintained  the  view,  so  far  as  they  ever  had 
any  view  to  maintain,  that  all  that  was  of  any  value  in  the 
American  horse,  for  whatever  purpose,  had  come  down  to  us 
from  the  Arabian  through  the  English  race  horse.  Their  value, 
therefore,  consists  wholly  in  the  naked  statistics  which  they  con- 
tain. 

The  first  attempt  made  in  this  country,  in  the  direction  of 
publishing  a  stud  book  of  American  race  horses,  was  the  product 
of  Patrick  Xesbitt  Edgar,  an  eccentric  and  apparently  not  well- 


100  THE    HOESE    OF    AMEEICA. 

balanced  Irishman,  who  was  a  resident  of  North  Carolina.  This 
book,  which  purported  to  be  a  "first"  volume,  was  very  remarka- 
ble in  many  respects,  two  or  three  of  which  I  will  enumerate. 
The  prevailing  absence  of  dates  and  all  means  by  which  the  truth 
or  falsity  of  a  pedigree  could  be  determined;  the  astounding 
number  of  crosses  given,  even  to  the  immediate  descendants  of 
imported  sires;  the  multitude  of  animals  never  heard  of  before 
nor  since,  with  pedigrees  extended  a  dozen  crosses;  the  absence 
of  many  animals  that  everybody  had  heard  of.  This  book  had 
been  in  print  about  thirty  years  before  I  ever  saw  it,  and  the  first 
impression  it  made  on  my  mind  was  that  the  author  was  "clean 
daft."  At  the  same  time,  through  all  his  work  there  was  a 
"method  in  his  madness,"  going  to  show  the  care  he  had  taken  to 
exclude  or  suppress  any  little  fact  that  might  lead  to  detection 
and  exposure.  As  an  illustration  of  his  methods  I  will  take  the 
following  pedigree,  at  random,  as  given  by  him  and  copied, 
literally,  by  Mr.  Bruce,  following  the  particular  form  of  the 
latter: 

CENTAUR,  b.  h.  foaled   1767,  bred  by  ;  owned  in  Vir- 
ginia, got  by  imported  Stirling  (Evans')  (foaled  1762). 

1st  dam  by  imp.  Aristotle  (imported  1764). 

2d  dam  by  imp.  Dotterel. 

3d  dam  by  impo  David  (imported  1763). 

4th  dam  by  imp.  Ranter  (imported  1762). 

5th  dam  by  imp.  Othello  (imported  1755). 

6th  dam  by  imp.  Childers  (imported  1761). 

7th  dam  an  imported,  thoroughbred  mare. 
Now,  what  do  we  know  about  this  pedigree  that  has  been  in- 
dorsed and  published,  just  as  here  stated,  by  two  stud-book 
makers?  They  do  not  pretend  to  know  by  whom  he  was  bred, 
nor  do  they  know  in  what  part  of  Virginia  he  was  owned,  but 
they  assume  to  know  perfectly  well  each  cross  in  his  pedigree 
and  that  his  seventh  dam  was  an  imported,  thoroughbred  mare. 
The  dates  of  importations  in  parentheses  in  the  foregoing  have 
been  placed  there  by  myself  for  the  sake  of  the  exhibit.  The 
horse  Dotterel,  the  original  of  that  name  and  by  the  same  reputed 
sire,  never  left  England,  and  it  is  probable  this  Dotterel  is  mythi- 
cal. Now,  let  us  analyze  this  pedigree  by  the  aid  of  the  search- 
light of  dates.  Ranter,  imported  1762,  might  have  had  a  filly  to 
his  credit  in  1763.  This  filly  at  two  years  old  might  have  been 
bred  to  David  and  produced  a  filly  in  1766.  This  filly  at  two 


THE    AMERICAN    RACE    HORSE.  101 

years  old  might  have  been  bred  to  Dotterel  and  produced  a  filly 
in  1769.  This  filly  at  two  years  old  might  have  been  bred  to 
Aristotle  and  produced  a  filly  in  1772.  This  filly,  at  two  years 
old,  might  have  bred  to  Evans'  Stirling  (or  Starling),  and  pro- 
duced the  colt  Centaur  in  1775 — but  he  was  foaled  in  1767.  Not 
once  in  a  million  times  would  this  succession  of  possibilities 
occur,  but  if  they  did  occur  in  this  case  the  pedigree  of  Centaur 
still  remains  absolutely  impossible,  for  four  generations  of  horses 
cannot  be  crowded  into  five  years.  This  exhibit  fairly  illustrates 
the  character  of  Mr.  Edgar's  work,  and  being  right  on  the  border 
line  between  the  "native"  race  horse  and  the  modern  "thorough- 
bred"we  see  just  how  they  compressed  the  breeding  of  eight  gener- 
ations into  the  space  of  fifteen  or  sixteen  years.  If  we  were  to 
compare  the  English  with  the  American  methods  of  manufactur- 
ing pedigrees,  it  would  be  hard  to  determine  which  was  the  more 
shamefully  dishonest.  Mr.  Edgar  was  fiercely  dissatisfied  with 
the  indifference  of  horsemen  to  his  enterprise,  and  with  the  lack 
of  support  which  they  rendered  him.  He  went  forward  with  his 
second  volume  and  professed  to  have  completed  it,  but  announced 
that  it  should  never  be  put  in  type  until  the  horsemen  of  the 
country  should  assist  and  support  him.  In  the  event  of  their 
failing  to  do  so  he  threatened  to  sink  his  manuscript  twenty  feet 
deep  in  the  center  of  the  Dismal  Swamp,  where  no  mortal  would 
ever  find  it.  The  second  volume  never  appeared,  and  it  is  to  be 
hoped  he  carried  out  his  threat. 

For  the  second  attempt  at  compiling  a  stud  book  of  American 
Race  Horses  I  must,  myself,  plead  guilty.  Some  time  in  the  "fif- 
ties" I  came  into  posssesion  of  a  number  of  volumes  of  the  "old" 
Spirit  of  the  Times,  Skinner's  American  Turf  Register,  three 
or  four  volumes  of  the  "English  Stud  Book"  and  a  large  number  of 
volumes  of  the  English  Sporting  Magazine.  As  I  was  then  dab- 
bling slightly  around  the  edges  of  "'horse  literature,"  I  found 
this  little  nucleus  of  a  library  very  convenient,  but  very  unsatis- 
factory in  answering  questions  that  came  to  me,  and  which  an 
official  position  seemed  to  require  that  I  should  be  able  to  answer. 
When  asked  for  the  pedigrees  of  other  domestic  animals  I  could 
take  down  the  Herd  Books  of  the  different  leading  breeds  and 
give  precise  information,  but  when  asked  about  the  pedigree  of  a 
horse,  unless  he  was  greatly  distinguished  as  a  racer,  days  of  solid 
labor  might  be  expended  on  the  one  question  and  then  not  dis- 
cover the  information  sought.  It  was,  perhaps,  ten  years  after 


102  THE   HOESE   OF   AMERICA. 

this  time  before  I  ever  saw  or  heard  of  the  misbegotten  and  fool- 
ish compilation  of  pedigrees  made  by  Edgar.  For  some  years 
this  labor  of  compilation  was  prosecuted  at  odd  hours,  for  my 
own  personal  use  and  satisfaction,  and  without  the  remotest  pur- 
pose of  ever  publishing  a  stud  book.  As  I  plodded  my  way 
along,  finding  what  I  supposed  to  be  a  fact  here  and  another 
there,  and  often  conflicting,  I  found  myself  invariably  accepting 
what  was  longest  as  a  pedigree,  as  this  feature  seemed  to  be  evi- 
dence not  only  of  completeness,  but  of  truthfulness  at  the  same 
time.  As  my  gleanings  grew  in  volume  my  interest  in  what  I 
was  doing  became  more  absorbing  and  intense,  and  when  I  had  com- 
pleted the  search  of  every  page  and  paragraph  of  my  published 
sources  of  information,  up  to  the  close  of  the  year  1839,  I  found  I 
had  enough  matter  for  a  large  volume.  About  this  time  I  came 
into  possession  of  a  copy  of  "Edgar's  Stud  Book" — and  I  wa& 
greatly  perplexed  to  know  what  to  do  with  it.  The  copyright 
was  dead  and  it  contained  a  good  many  unimportant  and  utterly 
unknown  things  that  I  had  not  met  with  in  all  my  gleanings. 
Under  these  circumstances  and  considering  the  fact  that  it 
abounded  in  the  crudest  uncertainties,  to  call  them  by  no  harsher 
name,  I  concluded  to  use  his  work  in  all  cases  where  I  did  not 
have  a  pedigree  from  other  sources,  to  cut  off  all  imaginary  ex- 
tensions and  to  insert  his  name,  in  every  case,  as  the  source  of  in- 
formation and  responsibility.  The  work  then  went  to  press  and 
the  first  volume  of  "Wallace's  American  Stud  Book"  made  its  ap- 
pearance in  1871.  The  time  and  labor  expended  on  the  first 
volume  made  me  quite  familiar  with  the  leading  performers  of 
the  several  generations  embraced  therein,  and  the  work  on  the 
second  volume  went  forward  with  more  ease  and  rapidity,  and  in 
1871  I  had  completed  the  gleaning  of  all  publications  relating  to 
the  race  horse,  up  to  the  close  of  1870. 

This  second  volume,  being  about  the  size  of  the  first,  was  com- 
pleted and  put  in  due  form  for  the  compositor,  but  never  was 
published.  The  reason  why  it  was  never  published  may  not  be 
without  interest  to  the  student  of  horse  genealogy,  and  I  will,  in 
a  few  words,  state  that  reason.  Side  by  side  with  the  progress 
of  the  second  volume  of  the  runners,  I  was  carrying  forward  a  care- 
ful investigation  of  the  lineage  of  the  early  trotters  and  their  pro- 
genitors. As  there  were  no  trotting  records  giving  pedigrees,  I 
was  compelled  to  go  back  to  the  breeders  as  the  only  source  of 
reliable  information.  When  I  obtained  this  from  intelligent  and 


THE    AMERICAN    RACE    HORSE.  103 

reputable  people  I  accepted  the  information  and  stood  by  it  as 
the  truth;  and  when  I  came  to  compare  it  with  the  representa- 
tions of  pedigree  made  in  advertisements  of  some  stallion  scion 
of  the  family,  the  truth  began  to  dawn  upon  me  that  advertise- 
ments, whether  in  newspapers  or  on  crossroads  blacksmith-shop 
doors,  with  scarcely  an  exception,  were  made  up  of  statements 
that  were  utterly  false  and  fictitious.  They  were  made  up  for 
the  single  purpose  of  securing  patronage,  and  generally  traced  in 
different  directions  to  famous  and  well-known  horses.  The  ficti- 
tious extensions  of  stallion  advertisements  have  served  as  the 
basis  for  the  fictitious  extensions  of  families  and  tribes.  When  I 
came  to  compare  the  extensions  of  trotting  pedigrees  with  run- 
ning pedigrees,  I  could  not  discover  that  the  one  was  any  more 
or  less  reliable  than  the  other.  They  rested  on  precisely  the 
same  basis  of  stallion  pedigrees,  and  no  difference  whether  they 
appeared  in  Mr.  Skinner's  Turf  Register  or  in  a  big  poster,  there 
was  no  censorship,  and  they  were  both  in  type — and  whatever 
was  in  type  was  generally  supposed  to  be  worthy  of  belief.  In 
one  respect  the  pedigrees  of  running  horses  are  more  reliable 
than  the  early  advertisements  of  trotting  horses,  particularly 
with  those  that  raced,  for  they  were  required  to  give  the  sire  and 
dam  when  they  were  entered  in  races,  and  a  failure  to  comply 
with  this  rule  was  penalized.  The  sires,  therefore,  are  generally 
right,  but  unfortunately  the  rule  did  not  require  the  dam  to  be 
named  and  definitely  specified,  hence  any  one  of  a  dozen  un- 
named mares  by  a  given  horse  could  be  represented  in  after  years 
as  the  dam  of  that  particular  horse.  Here  commenced  the 
trouble  in  the  unnamed  and  untraced  mares  that  never  have 
been  nor  ever  can  be  identified.  On  a  careful  and  sorrowful 
review  of  my  work  of  many  years  I  found  that  I  had  been  work- 
ing on  a  wrong  basis  from  the  start.  Instead  of  discovering  and 
arranging  a  great  many  valuable  truths,  as  I  supposed,  I  had  de- 
voted years  to  perpetuating  thousands  and  thousands  of  fictions 
in  these  unknown,  unnamed,  and  unidentified  dams.  This  is  the 
reason  the  second  volume  of  "Wallace's  American  Stud  Book" 
never  was  published.  The  only  benefit  I  ever  derived  from  the 
work  was  in  its  educational  aspects.  The  work  made  me  familiar 
with  the  early  running-horse  history  of  this  country  and  of  Eng- 
land, and  taught  me  what  so  many  horsemen  should  learn — that 
a  truth  is  always  better  than  a  lie.  The  more  carefully  and  thor- 
oughly I  went  into  the  origin,  lineage  and  history  of  what  we 


104  THE    HOKSE    OF    AMERICA. 

may  call  the  modem  race  horse,  the  more  evident  it  became  to 
my  mind  that  the  great  mass  of  the  running  horses  of  our  own 
generation  are  carrying,  in  their  pedigrees,  the  frauds  and  fic- 
tions of  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries,  to  say  nothing 
of  the  innumerable  deceptions  and  tricks  of  our  own  century. 
To  accept  and  propagate  these  untruths  is  simply  to,  in  a  man- 
ner, indorse  them,  and  an  attempt  to  eliminate  them  would  in- 
voke the  clamors  of  a  continent.  Hence,  more  than  twenty  years 
ago,  I  washed  my  hands  of  all  responsibility  for  the  pedigrees  of 
English  race  horses,  and  turned  my  attention  to  establishing  the 
lineage  of  the  American  trotter,  on  sure  foundations,  and  build- 
ing him  up  into  a  breed. 

The  third  attempt  at  compiling  the  pedigrees  of  running-bred 
horses  was  made  by  Mr.  Sanders  D.  Bruce,  of  New  York,  and  as 
it  followed  Edgar  and  Wallace,  it  was  made  up  chiefly  of  what  he 
found  in  these  works.  The  conscienceless  fictions  of  Edgar  were 
accepted  without  hesitation  or  remorse,  and  the  central  aim 
seemed  to  be  to  make  every  pedigree  as  long  as  possible,  whether 
true  or  false.  No  fictitious  stallion  advertisement  was  ever  too 
absurd  to  serve  as  a  basis  for  the  pedigrees  of  all  his  kindred. 
Mr.  Bruce  accepted  everything  and  rejected  nothing,  and  it  is 
not  probable  he  ever  investigated  a  pedigree  in  his  life.  His 
rule  of  action  seems  to  have  been  to  please  his  customers,  and  to 
scrupulously  avoid  all  public  discussions  of  pedigrees.  This  was 
the  politic  course  to  pursue,  for  any  attempt  to  defend  the  mon- 
strosities it  contained  would  have  wiped  it  out  of  existence  very 
quickly.  Bruce's  Stud  Book  seems  to  have  been  supported  by  a 
few  individuals,  from  the  beginning,  as  a  kind  of  eleemosynary 
institution,  and  it  is  not  likely  it  will  ever  rise  above  that  condi- 
tion. 

The  substantial  correctness  of  the  generations  extending 
back  for  a  period  of  sixty  or  eighty  years,  and  in  some  cases 
even  a  little  further,  is  a  very  valuable  contribution  to  our  store 
of  knowledge  in  this  department  of  industry,  but,  unfortunately, 
the  generations  beyond  those  that  may  be  classed  as  recent  very 
largely  rest  upon  foundations  that  are  fictitious  and  fraudu- 
lent. 

These  fictions  and  frauds  are  so  general  and  common  in 
the  remote  extensions  on  the  female  side  of  the  pedigree  that 
when  we  find  a  string  of  ten  or  perhaps  twenty  dams  and  not  one 


THE   AMERICAN    RACE   HORSE.  105 

of  them  named,  known  or  identified  until  we  strike  the  twenty- 
first,  and  she  described  as  "thoroughbred,  imported  mare,"  we 
know  that  this  is  the  work  of  the  professional  "pedigree  maker," 
and  not  more  than  once  in  a  hundred  times  will  we  be  mistaken. 
This  is  alike  true  of  both  English  and  American  pedigrees  of 
race  horses.  The  modern  crosses  are  comparatively  honest,  but 
the  remote  extensions,  through  the  maternal  lines,  in  both  coun- 
tries are  chiefly  the  products  of  a  venal  imagination. 

There  are  some  foundation  truths  in  the  history  and  develop- 
ment of  the  English  and  American  race  horse — for  they  are  both 
one  in  blood — to  which  I  must  briefly  advert  before  dismissing 
this  topic.  In  announcing  the  conclusions  which  I  have  reached, 
I  am  fully  conscious  that  I  will  come  in  contact  with  pre-con- 
ceived  opinions  that  have  been  very  prevalent,  if  not  universal, 
for  at  least  two  centuries. 

1.  There  were  race  horses  in  England  that  had  been  racing  and 
breeding  for  centuries    before  the   first    Saracenic   horse    was 
brought  there, -and  it  was  not  an  uncommon  thing  for  the  native 
to  beat  the  exotic,  when  he  first  arrived.     There  had  been  racing 
in  America,  by  what  we  will  call  the  native  stock — but  they  were 
all  English  and  Dutch — for  about  one  hundred  years  before  the 
first  English  race  horse  reached  this  country. 

2.  These  horses  had  been  selected  with  care  and  bred  for  cen- 
turies with  more  or  less  intelligence,  with  the  single  purpose  of 
increasing  their  speed.     During  those  centuries  there  were  not 
so  many  writers  on  biology,  heredity,  etc.,  as  we  have  now,  but 
the  old  aphorism,  "Like  begets  like" — a  complete  epitome  of  all 
science  on  this  subject — was  just  as  well  known  and  as  universally 
believed  a  thousand  years  ago  as  it  is  to-day.     We  may,  there- 
fore, safely  conclude  that  at  the  close  of  the  sixteenth  century 
there  were  many  native  English  horses,  descended  from  lines  and 
tribes  that  had  been  selected,  raced  and  bred  for  generations, 
that  were  fully  the  equals  of  the  best  of  the  exotics,  that  were 
brought  in  about  that  time. 

3.  The  native  stock  of  England  at  the  close  of  the  sixteenth 
century,  was  the  stock  from  which  the   American   colonies  re- 
ceived their  first  supplies,  except  the  few  brought  from  Utrecht, 
in  Holland,  to  the  Dutch  ^colonists  in  New  York.     When  brought 
across  the  Atlantic,  especially  in  Virginia,  no  time  was  lost  in  con- 
tinuing their  development  as  race  horses,  which  was  carried  for- 


106  THE   HOUSE   OF   AMERICA, 

ward  for  nearly  one  hundred  years  before  the  first  English  race 
horse  was  imported  for  their  improvement.  Their  regular  racing 
was  at  all  distances,  up  to  four  miles. 

4.  On  this  basis  of  the  native  English  blood,  common  to  both 
countries,  the  breed  of  English  and  American  race  horses  was 
built   up.     The   foreign   elements   brought   into   England   were 
chiefly  from  the  Barbary  States  and  from  Turkey.     This  exotic 
blood  certainly  had  a  very  marked  effect  upon  the  horse  stock  of 
Britain,  but  it  cannot  be  said,  with  certainty,  that  it  increased 
the  speed  of  the  race  horse.     All  the  experiences  of  the  past 
hundred  years  with  these  foreign  strains  have  gone  to  show  that 
instead  of  increasing  the  speed  they  have  retarded  it. 

5.  The  list  of  the  foundation  stock  of  the  English  race  horse  as 
given  by  Mr.  Weatherby,  in  the  first  volume  of  the  English  Stud 
Book,  and  reproduced  in  the  preceding  chapter,  is  worthy  of  very 
careful   study,  especially  by  those  who  seem  to  think  that  the 
English  race  horse  is  descended,  without  admixture,   from  the 
Arabian  horse.     The  striking  feature  of  that  list  is  the  overwhelm- 
ing preponderance  of  other  blood  than  the  Arabian,  even  if  we 
accept  all  that  is  called  Arabian  as  genuine.     Mr.  Parley's  horse, 
called  an  Arabian,  and  Lord  Godolphin's  horse,  called  an  Arabian, 
count  for  more  than  all  the  others  put  together,  in  the  make-up 
of  the  English  race  horse.    Mr.  Darley's  horse  came  from  a  region 
remote  from  Arabia  and  where  a  thousand  good  horses  are  bred 
for  one  in  Arabia,  and  should  be  called  a  Turk.     Lord  Godol- 
phin's  horse — "the  great  unknown" — will  ever  remain  unknown. 
He  seems  to  have  been  traced  to  France,  and,  after  studying  his 
portraiture,  it  is  probable  he  was  a  French  horse. 

6.  Taking  this  list  of  foundation  stock  and  viewing  it  from  the 
standpoint  of  the  greatest  lenity  and  liberality  that  a  sound  and 
careful   judgment   can   accord,  we   find  that  the  inheritance  of 
Arabian  blood  in  the  veins  of  the  English  race  horse,  if  there  was 
any   such   inheritance   at   all,    was   strictly   infinitesimal.      This 
historical  fact  in  the  foundation  of  the  race  horse,  showing  the 
inutility  of  Arabian  blood,   whether   genuine   or   spurious,    has 
been  fully  confirmed  in  great  multitudes  of  trials,  in  both  nations, 
during  the  past  hundred  years.     In  no  case  has  it  been  a  benefit, 
but  always  a  detriment. 

7.  The  race   horse  has  been  bred  through  centuries  for  the 
single  purpose  of  speed.     Through  all  his  generations  he  has 


THE   AMERICAN   RACE   HORSE.  107 

been  the  product  of  the  brains,  judgment  and  skill  of  his  success- 
ive masters.  Parents  were  selected  that  could  go  out  and  win 
the  prizes  from  their  fellows.  The  next  generation  was  not  only 
the  product  of  running  parents,  but  parents  that  were  from  run- 
ning families.  Thus  grew  up  the  pedigree  of  the  race  horse 
under  the  direction  of  thought  and  judgment.  Pedigrees  are  prac- 
tical things  and  full  of  winners,  and  in  no  sense  made  more  valu- 
able by  having  some  supposed  "Arabian"  cross  away  back  ten 
generations,  that  never  ran  in  his  life. 


CHAPTER    VIII. 

COLONIAL  HORSE  HISTORY — VIRGINIA. 

Hardships  of  the  colonists — First  importations  of  horses — Racing  prevalent  in 
the  seventeenth  century— Exportations  and  then  importations  prohibited — 
Organized  horse  racing  commenced  1677  and  became  very  general — In  1704 
there  were  many  wild  horses  in  Virginia  and  they  were  hunted  as  game — 
The  Chincoteague  ponies  accounted  for — Jones  on  life  in  Virginia,  1720 — 
Fast  early  pacers,  Galloways  and  Irish  Hobbies — English  race  horses  im- 
ported— Moreton's  Traveler  probably  the  first — Quarter  racing  prevailed  on 
the  Carolina  border — Average  size  and  habits  of  action  clearly  established — 
The  native  pacer  thrown  in  the  shade  by  the  imported  runner — An  English- 
man's prejudices. 

THE  colony  of  Virginia,  settled  at  Jamestown,  May  13,  1607, 
was  subjected  to  a  succession  of  dissensions,  privations  and  dis- 
asters extending  through  a  number  of  years.  The  elements  of 
which  this  first  plantation  was  composed  were  heterogeneous,  and 
many  of  them  wholly  unsuited  to  battle  with  the  hardships  and 
privations  of  the  wilderness.  A  very  large  proportion  of  the  ad- 
venturers were  mere  idlers  at  home,  descended  from  good  but 
impecunious  families,  and  had  never  done  an  honest  day's  work 
in  their  lives.  Too  proud  to  labor  even  if  they  had  known  how, 
hunger  and  rags  soon  made  them  the  most  unhappy  and  discon- 
tented of  mortals.  The  governmental  aif airs  of  the  colony  fell  into 
confusion,  like  the  people  forming  it,  and  we  have  no  official 
record  of  what  was  done  for  a  number  of  years.  All  that  is 
known  to-day  of  what  transpired  in  the  early  years  of  the  colony 
has  been  gleaned  from  the  personal  correspondence  of  actors  in 
the  many  strifes  that  came  so  near  destroying  them  all.  These 
letters  are,  generally,  so  strongly  imbued  with  partisan  feeling 
that  there  seems  to  be  no  room  left  to  tell  us  anything  about  the 
industrial  growth  of  the  colony,  either  in  planting  or  breeding. 
The  excerpts,  therefore,  relating  to  the  early  horses  of  Virginia 
which  I  have  been  able  to  gather  from  a  great  many  sources,  will 
fall  far  short  of  being  complete,  but  I  think  they  will  serve  as  a 
basis  upon  which  to  form  an  intelligent  estimate  of  the  Virginia 


COLONIAL   HORSE   HISTORY— VIRGINIA.  109 

horses  of  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries,  and  as  to  the 
nineteenth,  the  newspapers  will  furnish  everything  what  is 
needed. 

It  is  evident  that  the  fleet  of  three  vessels  which  took  out  to 
Virginia  the  first  adventurers  took  also  some  horses  and  mares 
with  them;  for  the  governor  and  council,  who  went  out  the  next 
year,  in  reporting  the  condition  of  the  colonists  to  the  home 
company,  under  date  of  July  7,  1610,  use  this  language: 

"  Our  people,  together  with  the  Indians,  had,  the  last  winter,  destroyed  and 
killed  up  all  our  hogs,  inasmuch  as  of  five  or  six  hundred,  as  it  is  supposed,  there 
was  not  above  one  sow  that  we  can  hear  of  left  alive,  not  a  hen  or  a  chick  in 
the  fort,  and  our  horses  and  mares  they  had  eaten  with  the  first." 

From  a  letter  written  by  M.  Gabriel  Archer,  who  arrived  in 
Virginia  August  31,  1609,  we  gather  the  following  facts: 

"  From  Woolwich,  the  fifteenth  day  of  May,  1609,  seven  sail  weighed  anchor 
and  came  to  Plymouth  the  twentieth  day,  where  George  Soiuers,  with  two 
small  vessels,  consorted  with  us.  There  we  took  into  The  Blessing,  being  the 
ship  wherein  I  went,  six  mares  and  two  horses,  and  the  fleet  layed  in  some 
necessaries  belonging  to  the  action;  in  which  business  we  spent  time  till  the  2d 
of  June,  and  then  set  sail  to  sea,  but  crossed  by  South  West  winds,  we  put  into 
Falmouth,  and  there  stayed  until  the  8th  of  June,  then  gate  out." 

Now,  as  The  Blessing  was  probably  about  the  average  size 
of  the  rest  of  the  fleet,  I  think  it  is  reasonable  to  conclude  that 
each  of  the  other  vessels  took  some  horses  also.  In  a  report  of  a 
voyage  to  Virginia,  dated  November  13,  1611,  we  find  the  follow- 
ing statement:  "They  have  brought  to  this  colony  one  hundred 
cows,  two  hundred  pigs,  one  hundred  goats,  and  seventeen  horses 
and  mares."  In  1614  the  Virginians  made  a  raid  on  Port  Eoyal, 
in  what  was  then  called  New  France,  and  carried  off  to  Virginia, 
among  other  captures,  a  number  of  horses,  mares  and  colts.  A 
second  raid  in  the  same  quarter  seems  to  have  resulted  in  carry- 
ing off  wheat,  horses,  clothing,  working  tools,  etc. 

Mr.  Harmor,  writing  in  1614,  in  his  "True  Discourse  on  the 
Present  State  of  Virginia,"  says:  "The  colony  is  already  fur- 
nished with  two  hundred  neat  cattle,  infinite  hogs  in  herds  all  over 
the  woods,  some  mares,  horses  and  colts,  poultry,  great  store, 
etc." 

In  1894,  in  the  Public  Records  Office  in  London,  I  found  that 
the  Virginia  Company  had  sent  out  four  mares,  February,  1619, 
on  The  Falcon.  And  further,  I  found  a  kind  of  summary  of 


110  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

what  the  company  had  done  in  the  past  toward  populating  and 
supplying  the  colonists  with  live  stock.  It  is  stated  that  they 
had  sent  twelve  ships,  taking  out  one  thousand  two  hundred  and 
sixty-one  persons,  making  the  total  number  in  Virginia  at  that 
date  about  two  thousand  four  hundred.  The  exportations. 
include  five  hundred  cattle,  with  some  horses  and  goats,  and  an 
infinite  number  of  swine.  In  1620  the  company  ordered  twenty 
mares  to  be  sent  over,  at  a  cost,  delivered,  of  fifteen  pounds 
each.  From  the  price  of  horses  in  England  at  that  day,  I  would 
infer  that  somebody  was  making  money  out  of  the  colonists. 

In  a  little  work  published  in  London,  1646,  entitled  "A  Per- 
fect Description  of  Virginia,"  the  author  says  that  "There  are  in 
Virginia,  of  an  excellent  raise  (race),  about  two  hundred  horses 
and  mares."  It  is  evident  that  this  statement  is  a  mere  estimate, 
and  I  am  disposed  to  think  it  a  very  wild  estimate  from  what  follows 
in  a  very  few  years.  It  is  true  that  horses  do  not  propagate  and 
increase  as  fast  as  any  other  variety  of  domestic  animals,  but 
under  the  circumstances  every  effort  would  be  made  to  increase 
the  stock,  and  from  what  follows,  I  think  my  criticism  will  be 
sustained. 

In  the  legislation  of  the  colony  we  find  no  mention  of  horses, 
till  the  year  1657,  when  the  exportation  of  mares  was  prohibited. 
Eleven  years  after  this  (1668)  this  restriction  was  removed  and 
the  exportation  of  both  mares  and  horses  permitted.  The  very 
next  year,  1669,  the  importation  of  more  horses  was  prohibited 
by  legislative  enactment.  From  this  it  would  seem  that  there 
were  already  too  many  horses  in  the  colony,  or  possibly  some 
horse  breeder  had  begun  to  realize  that  there  were  better  horses 
in  some  of  the  other  colonies  that  were  finding  a  market  in  Vir- 
ginia, and  they  thus  sought  "protection"  for  their  own  stock. 

This  prohibition  could  not  have  been  aimed  at  the  mother 
country,  for  the  prices  obtained  would  not  justify  the  cost  and 
risk  of  a  sea  voyage.  We  must,  therefore,  conclude  that  it  was 
intended  to  shut  out  the  New  England  colonies,  which  were 
already  shipping  horses  to  all  the  settlements  on  the  seaboard,  as 
well  as  to  some  of  the  West  India  Islands.  In  this  we  see  at  what 
an  early  date  commenced  the  interchange  of  commodities  among 
the  colonies.  As  early  as  1647  the  Dutch  authorities  at  New 
Amsterdam  authorized  Isaac  Allerton  to  sell  twenty  or  twenty- 
five  horses  to  Virginia. 

The  court  records  of  Henrico  County,  Virginia,  for  the  year  1677 


COLONIAL   HORSE   HISTORY — VIRGINIA.  Ill 

contain  three  distinct  trials  growing  out  of  horse  races  for  that 
year.  In  one  case  the  contest  was  for  three  hundred  pounds  of 
tobacco;  in  another  the  winner  was  to  take  both  horses;  in  the 
third  the  amount  at  issue  does  not  appear.  From  the  readiness 
at  sharp  practice  and  from  the  cunning  dodges  to  get  clear  of 
paying  a  bet  it  is  very  evident  that  the  principals  and  the  wit- 
nesses were  well  up  in  all  the  tricks  of  racing  as  it  was  practiced 
at  that  early  day.  How  long  before  1677  racing  was  practiced  in 
Virginia  I  have  no  means  of  determining,  but  the  next  year  and 
the  next,  continuing  to  the  end  of  that  century,  the  records  of 
the  court  speak  for  themselves.  In  these  trials  I  find  the  names 
of  Thomas  Jefferson,  Jr.,  grandfather  of  President  Jefferson,  and 
also  the  name  of  Benjamin  Harrison,  the  ancestor  of  two  presi- 
dents, although  they  were  not  principals  in  any  of  the  cases. 

In  Beverley's  History  of  Virginia,  published  in  London,  1705, 
at  section  ninety-four,  we  have  the  following: 

"  There  is  yet  another  kind  of  sport,  which  the  young  people  take 
great  delight  in,  and  that  is  the  hunting  of  wild  horses;  which  they 
pursue,  sometimes  with  dogs  and  sometimes  without.  You  must  know 
they  have  many  horses  foaled  in  the  woods  of  the  uplands,  that  never  were  in 
hand  and  are  as  shy  as  any  savage  creature.  These  having  no  mark  upon  them 
belong  to  him  that  first  takes  him.  However,  the  captor  commonly  purchases 
these  horses  very  dear,  by  spoiling  better  in  the  pursuit,  in  which  case  he  has 
little  to  make  himself  amends,  besides  the  pleasure  of  the  chase.  And  very 
often  this  is  all  he  has  for  it,  for  the  wild  horses  are  so  swift  that  'tis  difficult  to 
catch  them;  and  when  they  are  taken  'tis  odds  but  their  grease  is  melted,  or 
else  being  old  they  are  so  sullen  that  they  can't  be  tamed." 

In  the  number  of  Wallace's  Monthly  for  September,  1877,  p. 
684,  will  be  found  a  very  interesting  article  from  the  pen  of  the 
late  Dr.  Elwood  Harvey,  on  "The  Chincoteague  Ponies,"  that 
have  from  time  immemorial  occupied,  in  a  wild  state,  the 
islands  of  Chincoteague  and  Assoteague  off  the  eastern  shore  of 
Virginia  and  Maryland.  The  traditions  relating  to  their  origin 
are  very  hazy  and  improbable,  and  the  most  reasonable  one,  be- 
cause it  is  within  the  range  of  possibilities,  is  that  a  Spanish  ship 
was  wrecked  off  this  part  of  the  coast  and  the  original  ponies 
were  on  board  and  swam  ashore.  It  is  well  established  that  they 
have  occupied  the  islands  for  more  than  a  hundred  years.  They 
are  about  thirteen  hands  high,  uniform  in  shape  and  resemble 
each  other  except  in  color,  for  all  colors  prevail.  Some  of  them 
pace  a  little,  and  they  have  rather  light  manes  and  tails,  and  no 
superabundance  of  hair  on  the  fetlocks.  Now,  the  horses  of 


112  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

Virginia,  at  the  period  of  which  Mr.  Beverley  writes,  and  of 
which  I  will  have  something  further  to  say  as  we  progress,  were 
but  little  if  any  larger  than  these  semi-wild  inhabitants  of  the 
islands;  they  were  of  all  colors  and  many  of  them  paced.  As  it 
is  well  known  that  the  action  of  the  ocean,  so  unaccountable  to 
all  human  ken,  one  year  builds  up  a  dike  connecting  islands  with 
the  mainland,  and  the  next  year,  perhaps,  washes  it  out  again, 
we  can  thus  easily  understand  how  a  herd  of  these  semi-wild 
animals  may  have  been  caught  and  kept  there.  In  this  way,  it 
seems  to  me,  the  origin  of  the  Ohincoteague  ponies  may  be  easily 
and  rationally  accounted  for,  without  any  shadow  of  violence  to 
the  clearest  reasoning.  Mr.  Hugh  Jones,  who,  in  many  direc- 
tions, seems  to  have  been  a  closer  observer  of  the  life  of  the  colo- 
nists than  any  of  the  other  tourists  whose  writings  we  have  ex- 
amined, wrote  a  little  work  entitled  "The  Present  State  of  Vir- 
ginia," which  was  published  in  London,  1724,  expressing  himself 
as  follows,  on  page  48: 

"The  common  planters,  leading  easy  lives,  don't  much  admire  labor  or  any 
manly  exercise  except  horse-racing,  nor  diversion  except  cock-fighting,  in  which 
some  greatly  delight.  This  easy  way  of  living,  and  the  heat  of  the  summers, 
make  some  very  lazy,  who  are  then  said  to  be  climate  struck.  The  saddle 
horses,  although  not  very  large,  are  hardy,  strong,  and  fleet;  and  will  pace 
naturally  and  pleasantly  at  a  prodigious  rate.  They  are  such  lovers  of  riding 
that  almost  every  ordinary  person  keeps  ahorse,  and  I  have  known  some  spend 
the  morning  in  ranging  several  miles  in  the  woods  to  find  and  catch  their  horses 
only  to  ride  two  or  three  miles  to  church,  to  the  courthouse  or  to  a  horse  race, 
where  they  generally  appoint  to  meet  on  business,  and  are  more  certain  of  find- 
ing those  they  want  to  speak  or  deal  with  than  at  their  home." 

Mr.  Jones  here  places  us  in  close  contact  with  the  character 
and  habits  of  the  people  of  that  day,  as  well  as  with  the  character 
and  qualifications  of  their  horses.  It  is  not  to  be  inferred,  I 
think,  that  all  their  horses  were  pacers,  but  that  all  their  saddle 
horses  were  pacers  there  can  be  little  doubt.  This  is  the  first 
intimation  we  have  from  Virginia  that  some  of  their  pacers  were 
very  fast,  and  when  Mr.  Jones  says  "they  could  pace  naturally 
and  pleasantly  at  a  prodigious  rate,"  he  means  that  the  speed 
was  marvelous,  wonderful,  astonishing.  This  "prodigious  rate," 
in  a  good  measure,  balances  Dr.  McSparran's  account  of  the  Narra- 
gansett,  which  he  had  seen  go  a  mile  "in  a  little  over  two  min- 
utes and  a  good  deal  less  than  three,"  and  gives  strength  to  the 
statement  of  Mr.  Lewis,  that  when  a  boy  he  had  ridden  in  pac- 


COLONIAL   HORSE   HISTORY — VIRGINIA.  113 

ing  matches  and  return  matches  between  the  Rhode  Islanders 
and  the  Virginians. 

In  the  Virginia  Gazette,  under  date  of  January  11,  1739,  we 
find  the  following  advertisement,  to  which  we  invite  special  at- 
tention, as  it  brings  out  some  facts  which,  inferentially,  throw  a 
great  deal  of  light  upon  horse  racing,  up  to  that  period: 

"This  is  to  give  notice  that  there  will  be  run  for  at  Mr.  Joseph  Seawell's, 
in  Gloucester  County,  on  the  first  Tuesday  in  April  next,  a  Purse  of  Thirty 
I'istoles,  by  any  horse,  mare  or  gelding;  all  sized  horses  to  carry  140  Ibs.  and 
Galloways  to  be  allowed  weight  for  inches,  to  pay  one  Pistole  entrance,  if  a 
subscriber,  and  two  if  not,  and  the  entrance  money  to  go  to  the  second  horse, 
•etc.  And  on  the  day  following,  on  the  same  course,  there  will  be  a  Saddle, 
Bridle  and  Housing,  of  five  pounds  value,  to  be  run  for  by  any  horse,  mare  or 
gelding  that  never  won  a  prize  of  that  value,  four  miles,  before.  Each  horse 
to  pay  five  shillings  entrance  and  that  to  go  to  the  horse  that  comes  in  second. 
And  on  the  day  following  there  is  to  be  run  for,  by  horses  not  exceeding  thir-. 
teen  hands,  a  hunting  saddle,  bridle  and  whip.  Each  horse  to  pay  two 
shillings  and  sixpence  at  entrance,  to  be  given  to  the  horse  that  comes  in 
second.  Happy  is  he  that  can  get  the  highest  rider." 

The  first  point  suggested  by  this  advertisement  is  that  there 
were  no  distinctions  made  except  by  size,  and  that,  at  this  date, 
1739,  there  were  no  English  race  horses  then  in  Virginia.  The 
second  point  is  that  there  was  such  a  thing  as  "horse  size"  but 
what  size  this  was  I  have  not  been  able  to  discover.  The  third 
point  is  that  Galloways  were  allowed  weight  for  inches.  They 
were  evidently  below  "horse  size."  But  they  were  expected  to 
«nter  for  the  big  purse  of  the  meeting,  and  they  must,  therefore, 
have  ranked  as  good  race  horses;  but  what  did  they  mean  by 
"Galloway?"  This  is  the  only  instance  in  which  I  have  met  the 
term  in  Virginian  history,  although  it  is  well  known  in  general 
horse  lore.  "Galloway"  is  an  old  name  of  a  territorial  division 
of  Scotland,  embracing  Wigtonshire,  part  of  Ayrshire,  etc.,  in 
the  southwestern  part  of  that  country,  and  was  at  one  time 
famous  for  the  excellence  of  its  pacers,  and  it  is  probable  they 
were  to  be  found  there  after  the  influx  of  eastern  blood  had 
driven  the  pacer  from  all  other  portions  of  Great  Britain.  The 
Irish  Hobbie,  always  undersized,  was  a  famous  race  horse,  as  well 
as  a  pacer,  many  generations  before  the  period  now  under  con- 
sideration. The  name  "Galloway"  is  only  known  in  history  and 
is  not  to  be  found  on  any  modern  map.  I  have  learned  by  many 
experiences  that  the  name  is  very  generally  believed  to  be  Irish 
and  is  confounded  with  "Galway,"  an  Irish  county.  It  is 


114:  THE    HORSE    OP    AMERICA. 

known  that  an  Irish  gentleman  shipped  many  cattle  to  the 
colony,  and  it  is  quite  possible  that  he  shipped  horses  also,  and  if 
this  reasoning  be  right,  these  "Galloways"  may  have  been  Irish 
"Hobbies."  It  will  be  observed,  also,  that  the  distance  to  be  run 
is  not  definitely  stated,  but  it  is  fairly  to  be  concluded  that  the 
race  of  the  second  day  was  to  be  four  miles,  and  none  of  them  less 
than  one  mile,  and  that  in  heats.  Races  of  four-mile  heats  were 
very  common  long  before  the  first  English  race  horse  was  imported. 

We  here  have  a  stock  of  horses  that  the  people  of  Virginia 
have  bred  and  ridden  and  raced  for  a  hundred  years,  and  we 
know  comparatively  nothing  about  them.  They  seem  to  have 
been  specially  adapted  to  the  saddle,  but  they  could  run  four 
miles,  or  they  could  run  a  quarter  of  a  mile,  like  an  arrow  from 
a  bow.  They  were  not  a  breed,  although  selecting  and  crossing 
and  interbreeding  for  a  hundred  years  would  make  them  quite 
homogeneous.  There  is  a  romantic  interest  attaching  to  these 
little  horses,  for  we  have  reached  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth 
century,  and  all  the  successive  idols  of  this  race-loving  people 
are  about  to  be  dethroned  by  their  own  act,  and  their  homage 
transferred  to  a  stranger — a  larger  and  finer  animal  and  faster 
over  a  distance  of  ground.  Whatever  of  glory  and  honor,  to  say 
nothing  of  money,  that  was  to  be  achieved  from  this  time  for- 
ward was  to  be  ascribed  to  the  newly  arrived  English  race  horse. 
But  the  truth  should  not  be  concealed  that  this  old  stock 
furnished  half  the  foundation,  in  a  vast  majority  of  cases,  for  the 
triumphs  of  future  generations  of  the  Virginia  race  horse,  and 
the  same  may  be  said  of  the  old  English  stock  upon  which  the 
eastern  blood  was  engrafted.  About  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth 
century  the  line  was  drawn,  and  there  was  thereafter  developed 
the  engrafting  of  the  new  upon  the  old.  In  1751-52,  Moreton's. 
imported  Traveller  was  there,  and  he  was  the  only  English 
race  horse  advertised  that  year.  There  may  have  been  two  or 
three  others,  but  they  had  not  made  themselves  known  to  the 
public,  and  I  very  much  doubt  whether  there  was  any  other.  A 
very  few  years  later  there  were  many  others,  and  some  of  them 
of  great  celebrity. 

Mr.  J.  F.  D.  Smith  made  an  extended  tour  of  the  colonies, 
especially  of  Virginia,  before  the  Revolutionary  war,  and  he  suf- 
fered some  of  the  inconveniences  growing  out  of  the  rising 
hostility  to  the  mother  country.  In  speaking  of  quarter  racing 
he  says: 


COLONIAL   HORSE   HISTORY — VIRGINIA.  115- 

"  In  the  southern  part  of  the  colony  and  in  North  Carolina,  they  are  much 
attached  to  Quarter  Racing,  which  is  always  a  match  between  two  horses  to 
run  one  quarter  of  a  mile,  straight  out,  being  merely  an  exertion  of  speed;  and 
they  have  a  breed  that  perform  it  with  astonishing  velocity,  beating  every  other 
for  that  distance  with  great  ease,  but  they  have  no  bottom.  However,  I  am 
confident  that  there  is  not  a  horse  in  England,  nor  perhaps  in  the  whole  world, 
that  can  excel  them  in  rapid  speed;  and  these  likewise  make  excellent  saddle 
horses  for  the  road." 

It  will  be  observed  that  Mr.  Smith  speaks  of  these  heavily 
muscled  horses  as  a  breed,  which  expression,  I  suppose,  is  intended 
to  be  used  in  a  restricted  sense.  In  the  many  generations  of 
horses  that  would  necessarily  succeed  each  other  in  a  century,  in 
the  hands  of  a  people  so  devotedly  fond  of  racing,  it  is  merely  an 
exercise  of  common  sense,  among  barbarous  as  well  as  civilized 
people  all  over  the  world,  to  "breed  to  the  winner."  In  this 
way,  and  without  any  infusion  of  outside  blood,  there  would  be 
improvement  in  the  strength  and  fleetness  of  all  animals  bred  for 
the  quarter  path.  He  remarks  further  that  '  'these  likewise 
make  excellent  saddle  horses  for  the  road."  In  that  day  nothing 
was  accepted  as  a  "saddle  horse"  that  could  not  take  the  pacing 
gait  and  its  various  modifications.  This  was  true  of  Virginians 
of  that  day,  and  it  is  still  true  of  their  descendants  who  have 
built  up  new  States  further  west. 

In  the  early  days,  as  already  intimated,  it  was  the  habit  of  Vir- 
ginians to  brand  their  horses  and  then  turn  out  all  not  in  daily 
use  to  "hustle"  for  their  own  living.  As  a  matter  of  course  these 
animals  would  often  stray  long  distances  away,  and  not  a  few 
never  were  found.  In  due  time,  legislation  provided  for  the  re- 
covery of  estrays,  embracing  all  kinds  of  domestic  animals  as  well 
as  negro  slaves.  Fortunately  this  enables  me  to  reach  what  may 
be  considered  "original  data,"  in  determining  the  size  and  habits 
of  action  of  the  early  Virginian  horses.  As  the  field  of  my  ex- 
amination, I  have  taken  the  Virginia  Gazette,  for  the  years  1751 
and  1752.  published  at  Williamsburgh,  and  in  these  volumes  I 
find  a  great  many  advertisements  of  "Strayed  or  Stolen"  animals 
scattered  through  the  pages;  and  in  the  second  especially  a  great 
many  "Taken  Up"  advertisements  appear.  In  a  very  large  pro- 
portion of  these  notices,  perhaps  a  majority  of  them,  all  the  de- 
scription that  is  given  is  the  color,  sex  and  brand,  with  occasion- 
ally some  natural  mark.  As  a  matter  of  course  these  are  of  no 
value  for  the  object  in  view.  In  some  cases  the  size  is  given 
without  the  gait,  and  in  others  the  gait  is  given  without  the  size,. 


116  THE    HOUSE   OF   AMERICA. 

in  a  few  both  size  and  gait  are  given.  The  range  of  size  is  from 
one  of  fifteen  hands  down  to  one  of  twelve  hands,  with  more  of 
thirteen  hands  than  any  other  size,  either  above  or  below.  The 
true  average  of  the  whole  number  is  a  little  over  thirteen  hands 
.and  one  inch,  and  none  of  them  are  called  ponies.  As  further 
-evidence  of  the  small  size  of  the  colonial  Virginia  horses  we  find 
that  in  1686  the  legislature  of  Virginia  passed  an  act  providing 
for  the  forfeiture  of  all  stallions  under  thirteen  and  a  half  hands 
high  found  running  at  large.  It  provided  that  any  person 
might  take  up  such  stallion  and  carry  him  before  a  justice  of  the 
peace,  and  if  he  measured  less  than  thirteen  and  a  half  hands, 
the  justice  was  required  to  certify  to  the  measurement  and  the 
facts,  and  the  horse  passed  legally  to  his  new  owner. 

As  to  the  gaits  I  find  just  twice  as  many  pacers  as  trotters. 
Double-gaited  animals,  of  which  there  were  a  few,  I  have  here 
•classed  with  the  pacers.  That  many  of  these  little  fellows  were 
very  stout  and  tough  is  fully  demonstrated  by  the  fact  that  they 
could  run  heats  of  four  miles  with  a  hundred  and  forty  pounds 
on  their  backs.  This  closes  the  first  epoch  in  the  history  of  the 
Virginia  horse.  The  fleet  and  compact  little  horse  of  thirteen  to 
fourteen  hands  had  had  his  day,  and  he  was  now  about  to  be 
overshadowed  by  a  greater  in  speed  and  a  greater  in  stature. 
Much  of  the  blood  of  the  little  fellow  that  could  run  four  miles 
-and  pace  "at  a  prodigious  rate,"  was  commingled  with  the  blood 
of  the  English  race  horse,  but  whatever  its  triumphs,  the  lately 
arrived  "foreigner"  took  the  credit.  A  man  would  have  been 
pronounced  "clean  daft"  if  at  that  time  he  had  dreamed  that 
one  hundred  and  forty  years  later  the  blood  of  this  little  pacer 
would  stand  at  the  head  of  the  great  trotting  interest  of  the 
world.  The  tough  little  fellow  has  retained  his  qualities  through 
all  the  generations  in  which  he  has  been  neglected,  despised  and 
forgotten,  until  he  was  taken  up  twenty  odd  years  ago,  and  now 
the  names  and  achievements  of  the  great  pacers  are  as  familiar 
to  the  whole  American  people  as  ever  were  the  name  of  the  great- 
est running  horses.  It  is  not  known  how  long  he  continued  to  be 
a  factor  in  the  racing  affairs  of  Virginia,  but  probably  not  later 
than  about  1760. 

From  about  1750  to  1770  seems  to  have  been  a  period  of  great 
prosperity  in  Virginia  and,  notwithstanding  the  general  improvi- 
dence of  the  times,  many  of  the  large  landholders  and  planters 
were  getting  rich  from  their  fine  crops  of  tobacco  and  their 


COLONIAL   HORSE   HISTORY — VIRGINIA.  11? 

negroes.  This  prosperity  manifested  itself  strongly  in  the 
direction  of  the  popular  sport  of  horse  racing  and  improving  the 
size,  quality,  and  fleetness  of  the  running  horse.  England  had 
then  been  selecting,  importing  Eastern  blood,  and  "breeding  to 
the  winner"  for  a  hundred  years,  with  more  or  less  intelligence 
and  success,  while  the  colonists  had  rested  content  with  the  de- 
scendants of  the  first  importations  from  the  mother  country. 
Doubtless  progress  had  been  made  here  too,  but  it  was  as  the 
progress  of  a  poor  man  against  another  with  great  wealth  and 
backed  by  the  encouragements  of  royalty.  The  English  horse  could 
then  run  clear  away  from  the  Saracenic  horse,  his  so-called  pro- 
genitor, and  he  was  very  much  larger  than  that  "progenitor." 
We  can  understand  how  the  speed  might  be  increased  by  its  de- 
velopment in  a  series  of  generations  and  by  always  breeding  to 
the  fastest,  but  the  increase  of  size  can  hardly  be  accounted  for 
as  the  result  of  climatic  causes — but  we  are  getting  away  from 
the  thought  before  us.  When  the  Virginia  planter  found  he  had 
a  handsome  balance  in  London,  subject  to  his  draft,  he  at  once 
ordered  his  factor  to  send  him  over  the  best  racing  stallion  he 
could  find.  The  action  of  one  planter  stirred  up  half  a  dozen 
others  who  felt  they  could  not  afford  to  be  behind  in  the  matter 
of  improvement,  but  more  especially  that  they  could  not  afford 
to  be  behind  in  the  finish  at  the  fall  and  spring  race  meetings  of 
the  future.  These  importations  went  on  continuously  for  about 
twelve  years,  and  until  they  were  interrupted  by  the  excited  rela- 
tions and  feelings  between  the  colonies  and  the  mother  country 
and  the  preparations  for  the  War  of  the  Revolution,  which  was 
then  imminent.  After  the  close  of  the  Revolution  a  perfect 
avalanche  of  race  horses  was  poured  upon  us,  some  of  which  were 
good,  but  a  great  majority  of  them  were  never  heard  of  after 
their  arrival,  on  the  race  course  or  elsewhere.  But  up  to  the  close 
of  the  century  they  had  not  succeeded  in  exterminating  the 
pacer — the  saddle  horse  of  a  hundred  generations. 

As  a  specimen  of  how  absurdly  a  man  can  talk  and  even  write 
on  subjects  of  which  he  knows  nothing,  I  cannot  refrain  from 
giving  the  following  from  what  an  Englishman  had  to  say  in 
1796  about  the  horses  and  horsemanship  of  Virginia: 

"The  horses  in  common  use  in  Virginia  are  all  of  a  light  description,  chiefly 
adapted  for  the  saddle;  some  of  them  are  handsome,  but  are  for  the  most 
part  spoiled  by  the  false  gaits  which  they  are  taught.  The  Virginians  are 
wretched  horsemen,  as  indeed  are  all  the  Americans  I  have  met  with,  excepting 


118  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

some  few  in  the  neighborhood  of  New  York.  They  ride  with  their  toes  ju^t 
under  the  horse's  nose,  and  their  stirrup  straps  Jef  c  extremely  long,  and  the  sad- 
dle being  put  three  or  four  inches  on  the  mane.  As  for  the  management  of  the 
reins,  it  is  what  they  have  no  conception  of.  A  trot  is  odious  to  them,  and 
they  express  the  utmost  astonishment  at  a  person  who  can  like  that  uneasy 
gait,  as  they  call  it.  The  favorite  gaits  which  all  their  horses  are  taught  are 
a  pace  and  a  wrack.  In  the  first  the  animal  moves  his  two  feet  on  one  side  at 
the  same  time  and  gets  on  with  a  sort  of  a  shuffling  motion,  being  unable  to 
spring  from  the  ground  on  these  two  feet,  as  in  a  trot.  We  should  call  this  an 
unnatural  gait,  as  none  of  our  horses  would  ever  move  in  that  manner  without 
a  rider;  bat  the  Americans  insist  upon  it  that  it  is  otherwise,  because  many  of 
their  colts  pace  as  soon  as  born.  These  kind  of  horses  are  called  "natural 
pacers"  and  it  is  a  matter  of  the  utmost  difficulty  to  make  them  move  in  any 
other  manner.  But  it  is  not  one  horse  in  five  hundred  that  would  pace  without 
being  taught." 

There  can  hardly  be  a  doubt  that  our  English  friend  in  his 
^'Travels  Through  the  States"  noted  and  wrote  down  just  what 
he  thought  he  saw,  and  when  he  saw  anything  that  he  never  had 
seen  in  England,  he  was  ready  to  either  deny  its  existence  alto- 
gether or  to  insist  that  there  was  some  mistake  about  it.  Poor 
man,  he  could  not  understand  how  there  could  be  anything  out- 
side of  England  that  could  not  be  found  in  England.  His 
vision,  mental  and  physical,  seems  to  have  been  restricted  to  the 
shores  of  his  own  island  home,  and  he  was  probably  a  descendant 
of  a  very  good  man  we  once  heard  of.  As  you  sail  up  the  Firth 
of  Clyde  you  pass  an  island  of  three  or  four  miles  in  extent, 
called  Cumbrae.  At  the  head  of  ecclesiastical  affairs  in  the 
island  was  a  very  pious  man,  some  generations  back,  and  every 
Sunday  morning  he  prayed  that  the  Lord  would  bless  the  "king- 
dom of  Cumbrae  and  the  adjacent  islands  of  Great  Britain  and 
Ireland."  The  author  of  "Travels  Through  the  States"  was 
evidently  one  of  the  very  numerous  descendants  of  this  good 
man,  as  they  are  scattered  all  over  England,  and  as  I  am  a  strong 
believer  in  the  laws  of  heredity,  I  can  hardly  avoid  this  conclu- 
sion. Indeed,  some  of  the  numerous  tribe,  tracing  their  genealogy 
through  many  generations  back  to  "The  kingdom  of  Cumbrae," 
have  found  their  way  across  the  water,  and  at  another  place  I 
will  pay  my  respects  to  them.  But  to  return  to  our  traveler: 
there  can  be  no  doubt  about  his  never  having  seen  a  pacer  in 
England,  for  the  last  one  had  disappeared  before  his  day,  unless 
an  occasional  one  might  have  been  found  in  the  old  province  of 
Galloway,  in  the  southern  part  of  Scotland.  If  he  had  known 


COLONIAL   HORSE   HISTORY — VIRGINIA.  119 

the  history  of  the  horses  of  his  own  country  he  would  have  known 
that  from  the  time  of  King  John  down  to  that  of  James  I.,  the 
pacer  was  the  most  popular  and  fashionable  horse  in  England, 
and  that  the  nobility  and  gentry  used  no  other  kind  for  the  sad- 
dle. He  was  always  of  "a  mean  stature/'  but  he  was  compact, 
hardy  and  strong,  and  could  carry  his  burden  a  long  journey  in  a 
day  with  great  ease  and  comfort  to  his  rider.  In  the  reign  of 
Elizabeth,  he  was  kept  separate  from  others,  and  bred  as  a  breed 
on  account  of  his  easy,  gliding  motion,  which  he  transmitted  to 
his  progeny.  At  the  time  of  the  plantation  of  the  English  colo- 
nies in  this  country  the  pacers  were  very  numerous,  and  as  they 
were  just  the  type  of  horse  suited  to  wilderness  life,  a  very  large 
proportion  of  those  selected  were  pacers.  The  pacers  our  traveler 
saw  in  Virginia  were  the  lineal  descendants  of  the  original  Eng- 
lish stock  brought  over  by  the  adventurers,  and  the  awkward  rid- 
ing charged  upon  the  Virginians,  with  some  evident  exaggera- 
tions, was  wisely  and  sensibly  adapted  to  the  action  of  the  horses 
they  were  riding.  The  criticism  of  the  long  stirrups  is  wholly 
unjust,  as  they  are  just  the  right  length  for  the  "military"  seat, 
and  nobody  in  this  country  when  mounted  on  a  real  saddle  horse 
would  ever  think  of  taking  any  other.  The  Englishman,  when 
mounted  on  his  "bonesetter,"  is  compelled  to  have  his  stirrups 
.short  so  that  he  can  rise  and  fall  with  every  revolution  the  horse 
makes  on  the  trot  to  save  himself  from  being  shaken  to  death. 
This  up  and  down,  up  and  down,  tilt-hammer  seat,  if  it  can  be 
•called  "a  seat"  at  all,  is  one  of  the  most  ungraceful  things, 
•especially  for  a  lady,  that  can  be  conceived  of  in  all  the  displays 
of  good  and  bad  equestrianism.  The  English  have  been  com- 
pelled to  adopt  it  because  they  have  no  trained  saddle  horses, 
-and  a  lot  of  brainless  imitators  about  our  American  cities  have 
followed  them  because  "it  is  English,  you  know."  If  the  Eng- 
lish had  pacers  and  horses  trained  to  the  "saddle  gaits,"  they 
never  would  have  anything  else,  and  the  tilt-hammer  "seat" 
would  disappear  from  Kotten  Kow  and  everywhere  else. 


CHAPTER  IX. 

COLONIAL   HORSE   HISTORY — NEW   YORK. 

Settlement  of  New  Amsterdam — Horses  from  Cura(;oa — Prices  of  Dutch  and 
English  horses — Van  der  Donck's  description  and  size  of  horses — Horses- 
to  be  branded — Stallions  under  fourteen  hands  not  to  run  at  large — 
Esopus  horse — Surrender  to  the  English,  1664 — First  organized  racing — 
Dutch  horses  capable  of  improvement  in  speed— First  advertised  Sub- 
scription Plate — First  restriction,  contestants  must  "be  bred  in  America  " 
— Great  racing  and  heavy  betting — First  importations  of  English  running 
horses — Half-breds  to  the  front — True  foundation  of  American  pedigrees 
— Half  bushel  of  dollars  on  a  side — Resolutions  of  the  Continental  Congress 
against  racing — Withdrawal  of  Mr.  James  De  Lancey — Pacing  and  trot- 
ting contests  everywhere — Rip  Van  Dam's  horse  and  his  cost. 

FOR  several  years  after  Henry  Hudson,  an  Englishman  in  the 
employ  of  the  Dutch,  discovered  the  harbor  of  New  York  and 
the  great  river  which  took  his  name,  in  the  year  1609,  there  is 
uncertainty  and  doubt  as  to  the  nature  of  the  settlement.  For  a 
time  it  seems  to  have  been  merely  a  trading  post,  occupied  only 
by  those  in  the  employment  of  the  company  that  owned  it,  and 
without  many  of  the  elements  requisite  to  make  up  a  permanent 
colony.  At  Fort  Orange  (Albany)  and  at  Esopus  (Kingston), 
the  conditions  were  the  same  as  at  New  Amsterdam,  as  New 
York  was  then  named.  The  first  party  of  immigrants  that  seemed 
to  have  the  elements  of  permanent  colonization  about  it  arrived 
in  1625,  and  consisted  of  six  families  and  several  single  men, 
making  in  all  forty-five  persons,  with  furniture,  utensils,  etc., 
and  one  hundred  and  three  head  of  cattle.  Doubtless  some  of 
these  "cattle"  were  horses,  and  the  general  instead  of  the  specific 
term  was  used  in  enumerating  them.  Very  little  is  known  of  the 
early  horse  history  of  the  New  Netherlands,  as  the  whole  region 
was  then  named;  there  can  be  no  doubt,  however,  that  they  in- 
creased and  multiplied.  Sometime,  probably  about  1643,  a  cargo 
or  two  of  horses  were  brought  up  from  Curac.oa  and  Azuba,  in 
the  Dutch  West  Indies,  but  the  climatic  change  was  too  great  for 
them,  and  they  did  not  do  well,  being  specially  subject  to  diseases 


COLONIAL   HORSE    HISTORY — NEW    YORK.  121 

from  which  the  Dutch  horses  seemed  to  have  complete  immunity. 
In  1647,  Isaac  Allerton,  as  agent,  was  authorized  to  sell  twenty 
or  twenty-five  of  these  horses  to  Virginia,  and  whether  the 
authorities  were  able  thus  to  get  clear  of  a  bad  investment  does 
not  appear  from  the  existing  records.  In  a  report  to  the  home 
company,  made  in  1650,  I  find  the  following  prices  were  given  at 
that  time:  A  young  mare  with  second  foal,  one  hundred  and 
fifty  florins;  stallion,  four  or  five  years  old,  one  hundred  and 
thirty  florins;  milch  cow,  one  hundred  florins.  The  same  report 
makes  a  comparison  by  giving  the  prices  of  New  England  horses, 
as  follows:  A  good  mare  one  hundred  to  one  hundred  and  twenty 
florins;  stallion,  one  hundred  florins;  milch  cow,  sixty  to  seventy 
florins.  Neither  horses  nor  cows  were  then  allowed  to  be  shipped 
out  of  the  province  without  permission  of  the  council. 

Adrien  Van  der  Donck  wrote  a  description  of  New  Netherlands 
which  was  published  1656,  in  which  he  speaks  of  the  horse  stock 
as  follows: 

"  The  horses  are  of  the  proper  breed  for  husbandry,  having  been  brought 
from  Utrecht  for  that  purpose;  and  this  stock  has  not  diminished  in  size  or 
quality.  There  are  also  horses  of  the  English  breed  which  are  lighter,  not  so 
good  for  agricultural  use,  but  fit  for  the  saddle.  These  do  not  cost  as  much  as 
the  Netherlands  breed  and  are  easily  obtained." 

From  a  large  number  of  facts  collected  for  the  years  1777  and 
1778  the  horses  then  averaged  about  fourteen  hands  and  one  inch, 
-and  when  compared  with  earlier  data  it  is  evident  they  had  in- 
creased in  height.  In  the  gaits  of  those  advertised,  fifteen  both 
paced  and  trotted,  nine  trotted  only,  and  seven  paced  only.  As 
this  was  in  the  period  of  the  Revolution,  and  right  in  the  center 
of  hostilities,  some  allowance  should  be  made  for  horses  from 
other  colonies. 

The  people  of  this  colony,  like  those  of  all  the  others,  branded 
their  horses  and  turned  them  out  to  seek  their  own  living  in  the 
summer  season,  and  this  resulted  in  many  losses,  and  oftentimes 
in  much  bad  feeling.  The  Dutch  were  not  accustomed,  in  the 
"old  country,"  to  building  fences  around  their  crops  high  enough 
and  strong  enough  to  keep  out  all  the  droves  and  herds  of  animals 
running  at  large.  In  the  line  of  improvement  and  increase  of 
size  in  their  horses,  they  provided  that  all  stallions  running  at 
large,  of  two  years  and  nine  months  old,  must  be  fourteen  hands 
high  or  be  castrated.  This  law  was  in  force  in  1734,  and  no  doubt 


122  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

was  effective.  Among  the  many  laws  for  the  suppression  of  vice 
of  different  kinds,  I  find  one  prohibiting  horse  racing  on  Sun- 
day, and  from  this  we  might  infer  that  it  was  not  forbidden  on 
other  days  of  the  week. 

In  old  newspapers,  advertisements,  etc.,  we  sometimes  come 
across  "Esopus  Horses,  Esopus  Mares,"  and,  for  years,  I  was  not 
able  to  tell  what  this  term  meant.  The  locality  of  Kingston  was 
originally  called  Esopus,  and  in  that  neighborhood  there  were 
several  farmers  who  bred  horses  largely,  at  an  early  day  in  the 
history  of  the  colony,  and  the  locality  became  famous  for  the 
character  and  quality  of  the  horses  produced  there.  They  were 
of  the  best  and  purest  Dutch  blood,  and  for  what  we  would  call 
"all-purpose  horses"  their  fame  was  very  wide  in  that  day.  Hence 
I  infer  that  the  term  " Esopus"  was  used  to  indicate  what  was 
considered  the  best  type  of  Dutch  horses.  There  is  danger  of 
going  astray  in  the  meaning  of  the  term  "Dutch  horses,"  as  in 
later  times  it  was  applied  to  the  great,  massive  draft  horses  of 
Pennsylvania.  They  were  better  "for  agricultural  purposes,"  as 
Van  der  Donck  puts  it,  than  the  Connecticut  horses,  because  they 
were  larger  and  stronger,  but  they  were  sprightly  and  active  and 
some  of  them  could  run  very  well.  They  had  a  fine  reputation 
in  the  adjoining  colonies. 

New  Amsterdam,  and  consequently  all  the  plantations  in  New 
Netherlands,  surrendered  to  Colonel  Nicolls,  commanding  the 
British  forces,  August  27,  1664.  Colonel  Nicolls  remained  as 
governor  of  the  colony  three  or  four  years  and  until  he  was  suc- 
ceeded by  Governor  Lovelace.  Among  his  early  official  acts,. 
Governor  Nicolls  laid  out  a  race  course  on  Hempstead  Plains, 
and  named  it  Newmarket,  after  the  famous  course  in  England. 
No  engineering  or  grading  was  necessary,  as  nature  had  already 
made  a  perfect  course  without  stick  or  stone  or  other  obstruction. 
The  first  race  was  run  1665,  and  although  it  was  a  long  distance 
from  the  city,  the  presence  of  the  governor  gave  the  occasion 
prestige  and  there  was  a  great  gathering  of  the  gentry  from  town, 
and  the  farmers  of  Long  Island.  These  meetings  were  kept  up 
annually  by  the  appointment  of  succeeding  governors,  and  after 
a  time  they  were  held  twice  a  year,  spring  and  fall.  There  are 
some  very  important  facts  about  these  races  that  are  not  known 
and  probably  never  will  be  known,  namely,  who  were  the  nomina- 
tors and  what  breed  of  horses  were  entered  in  these  contests. 
With  these  two  essential  facts  left  out  the  value  of  the  informa- 


COLONIAL  HOESE   HISTORY — NEW    YORK.  123 

tion  is  greatly  impaired.  As  it  is  known,  however,  that  there 
were  but  two  breeds  or  types  of  horses  that  could  have  been  en- 
gaged in  these  contests,  it  becomes  a  matter  of  interest  to  reach 
a  conclusion  as  to  which  were  the  victors.  Mr.  John  Austin 
Stevens  has  done  some  very  excellent  work  on  this  part  of  the 
horse  history  of  New  York,  but  I  cannot  agree  with  him  in  his 
characterization  of  the  Dutch  horses  as  being  Flemish.  They 
did  not  come  from  Flanders,  but  from  Utrecht.  They  were  not 
great  unwieldy  brutes,  such  as  we  would  associate  with  Flanders, 
but  hardy,  compact  animals  that  could  make  their  way  in  the 
wilderness.  Although  larger,  it  does  not  follow  that  they  could 
not  run  as  fast  or  even  faster  than  the  New  England  ponies.  All 
breeds  of  horses  were  very  much  smaller  two  hundred  years  ago 
than  they  are  now.  These  races  were  instituted,  evidently,  for 
the  improvement  of  the  breed  of  horses  in  the  colony,  and  the 
great  majority  of  these  horses  were  the  descendants  of  the  original 
stock  brought  from  Utrecht.  We  must,  therefore,  conclude  that 
they  were  not  slow,  heavy,  unwieldy  animals  with  no  action,  as 
the  language  of  Mr.  Stevens  would  seem  to  imply,  but  capable 
of  improvement  in  the  direction  of  speed.  No  doubt  there  were 
very  many  New  England  horses  in  the  colony,  "lighter  and  bet- 
ter adapted  to  the  saddle,"  but  neither  the  interests  nor  the  pride 
of  the  old  Dutch  settlers  would  have  permitted  them  to  support 
racing  for  a  period  of  more  than  eighty  years,  unless  the  early 
Utrecht  blood  was  represented.  Besides  this,  the  weights  car- 
ried, one  hundred  and  forty  pounds,  and  the  distance,  gener- 
ally two-mile  heats,  were  conditions  that  were  strongly  against 
the  New  Englanders,  even  if  they  were  lighter  of  foot.  With 
these  two  breeds  in  the  field,  we  may  accept  it  as  an  inevitable 
sequence  that  the  superior  qualities  of  the  one  would  very  soon 
be  engrafted  on  the  other,  and  by  this  process  of  breeding,  a  bet- 
ter type  would  be  produced  than  either  of  the  originals.  This 
first  step  was  only  a  prelude  to  the  next,  and  that  again  to  the 
next,  until  the  common,  plain  lesson  was  thoroughly  learned, 
that  if  a  running  horse  was  wanted  the  way  to  get  him  was  to 
breed  to  a  running  horse  that  had  proved  he  was  a  running  horse. 
The  improvement  became  very  wide  and  general,  and  occasionally 
an  animal  was  produced  with  such  phenomenal  speed  that  he 
was  barred  from  stakes  and  purses.  On  this  foundation,  and 
this  alone,  the  running  turf  was  built  up  and  continued  for  about 


124  THE    HOUSE   OF   AMERICA. 

eighty  years,  with  occasional  intervals,  when  the  gamblers  made 
it  so  nasty  that  no  decent  people  would  go  near  it. 

The  first  subscription  plate  race  of  which  we  have  any  trace  is 
to  be  found  in  the  New  York  Gazette,  of  September  27,  1736,  of 
which  the  advertisement  is  given  below.  The  course  indicated 
is  believed  to  have  been  on  the  Church  Farm,  west  of  Broadway, 
and  not  far  from  where  the  Astor  House  now  stands.  There 
is  no  account  of  what  horses  won,  and  all  we  know  is  just  what  is 
in  the  advertisement. 

"On  Wednesday,  the  13th  of  October  next,  will  be  run  for,  on  the  course 
at  New  York,  a  plate  of  twenty  pounds'  value,  by  any  horse,  mare  or  gelding, 
earring  ten  stone  (saddle  and  bridle  included),  the  best  of  three  heats,  two 
rniles  each  heat.  Horses  intended  to  run  for  the  plate  are  to  be  entered  the 
day  before  the  race,  with  Francis  Child,  on  Fresh  Water  Hill,  paying  a  half 
pistole  each,  or  at  the  post  on  the  day  of  running,  paying  a  pistole.  And  the 
next  day  being  the  14th,  will  be  run  for,  on  the  same  course,  by  all  or  any  of 
the  horses  that  started  for  the  twenty-pound  plate  (the  winning  horse  excepted) 
the  entrance  money,  on  the  conditions  above.  Proper  judges  will  be  named 
to  determine  any  disputes  that  may  arise.  All  persons  on  horseback  or  in 
chairs,  coming  into  the  field  (the  subscribers  and  winning  horse  only  excepted) 
are  to  pay  sixpence  each  to  the  owner  of  the  grounds." 

Passing  on  to  1747  we  find  a  duplication  of  the  foregoing  for 
the  plate  race  of  that  year,  with  some  variations.  Entries  are 
restricted  to  animals  that  never  won  a  plate  before  "on  this 
island,"  and  a  horse  named  Parrot  is  not  permitted  to  compete. 
This  race  was  advertised  to  take  place  on  the  Church  Farm. 
The  next  that  I  will  notice  is  the  advertisement  of  this  same 
stake  for  1751,  when  the  weight  was  reduced  to  eight  stone,  and 
in  addition  to  the  usual  exclusion  of  previous  winners,  we  have 
for  the  first  time  a  restriction  of  the  entries  to  animals  "bred  in 
America.''7  At  the  May  meeting  at  Hempstead  Plains,  the  year 
following,  1752,  the  entries  are  again  restricted  to  animals  "bred 
in  America."  From  this,  then,  we  are  able  to  fix  the  precise  period 
when  English  Race  Horses  were  first  brought  to  this  colony.  At 
this  time  there  were  two  or  three  other  courses  on  Manhattan 
Island,  besides  several  noted  speeding  grounds  on  the  roads  and 
elsewhere,  for  the  trotters  and  the  pacers,  of  which  no  advertise- 
ments appear,  and  consequently  no  notice  was  taken  by  the  news- 
paper press. 

From  about  1760  up  to  the  time  when  the  Revolutionary  strug- 
gle began  to  engross  and  absorb  all  thought  and  all  action,  racing 


COLONIAL   HORSE   HISTORY — NEW   YORK.  125 

received  a  tremendous  impetus,  not  only  in  this  colony  but  in 
others.  Ten  or  twelve  years  before  this  a  very  few  rich  men  in 
Maryland,  Virginia  and  South  Carolina  commenced  importing 
English  running-bred  horses  with  great  success,  and  Mr.  James 
De  Lancey  and  other  rich  men  of  this  colony  were  only  a  year  or 
two  behind  them.  This  fancy  grew  and  spread  until  a  great  many 
breeders  and  planters  of  the  richer  class  had  imported  stock  of 
their  own,  while  their  less  wealthy  neighbors  were  well  supplied 
with  half-breds.  -These  half-breds  were,  for  a  short  time,  classed 
by  themselves  and  purses  were  offered  and  run  for,  restricted  to 
this  class.  After  experimenting  with  animals  bred  in  this  way  it 
was  found  that  not  a  few  of  them  were  able  to  hold  their  own  in 
any  company.  Mr.  Morris'  mare  Strumpet  was  only  half-bred, 
but  she  was  able  to  beat  many  of  the  imported  animals,  as  well 
as  the  full-breds  that  started  against  her.  From  this  it  would 
appear  that  breeding  for  speed  for  a  hundred  years  had  produced 
results  in  this  country  as  well  as  in  England.  These  experiments 
led  many  owners  of  old-fashioned  stock  to  try  it,  and  right  there 
is  where  thousands  and  thousands  of  our  best  old  American  pedi- 
grees end.  The  decade  from  1750  to  1760  witnessed  a  complete 
transformation  from  the  old  methods  to  the  new,  from  the  old  blood 
to  the  new,  and  more  than  all  from  the  old  managers  to  the  new. 
During  the  next  decade,  from  1760  to  1770,  the  new  blood  came 
out  in  great  strength,  and  the  saturnalia  of  horse  racing  grew 
more  and  more  furious.  Purses  of  a  hundred  dollars,  as  in  the 
olden  time,  sprang  up  to  ten  times  that  sum,  and  matches  were 
made  for  sums  that  were  fabulous  in  that  day.  One  match,  be- 
tween Mr.  Delaney  of  Maryland  and  Mr.  De  Lancey  of  New 
York,  specified  the  consideration  on  each  side  as  a  half  bushel 
of  silver  Mexican  dollars,  and  the  Marylander  had  the  satisfaction 
of  carrying  home  a  bushel  of  silver  dollars.  The  great  struggle, 
in  New  York,  for  supremacy  on  the  turf  was  between  the  De 
Lancey  family  and  the  Morris  family.  These  two  families  had 
been  bitter  political  rivals  for  years,  and  when  they  met  on  the 
turf  it  was  for  ' 'blood."  The  De  Lanceys  were  Tories  and  the 
Morrises  were  Whigs,  and  this  intensified  the  feeling  that  had  so 
long  existed  between  them.  When  the  Continental  Congress 
adopted  that  remarkable  resolution,  advising  the  people  to  ab- 
stain from  horse  racing,  cock  fighting,  gambling  and  some  other 
more  slight  offenses,  on  the  grounds  of  "economy,"  in  view  of 
the  approaching  conflict  with  the  mother  country,  the  effect  was 


126  THE    HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

thrilling  and  electrical.  Every  man  who  loved  his  home  and  his 
country  obeyed  it.  True,  as  I  have  said,  it  was  drawn  in  the 
form  of  advice  and  in  the  interests  of  "economy/'  but  there  was 
but  one  great  evil,  one  great  prodigality  at  which  it  was  aimed, 
and  that  was  the  gambling  connected  with  horse  racing.  It  was 
well  aimed  and  struck  the  bull's  eye.  It  came  in  the  midst  of 
preparations  for  the  greatest  race  meetings  ever  then  projected, 
but  everything  was  dropped  and  there  it  lay  through  all  the  years 
of  the  bloody  struggle  and  until  peace  again  smiled  upon  a  land 
of  free  men.  Before  avowed  hostilities  commenced,  Mr.  James 
De  Lancey,  one  of  the  first  and  largest  importers  and  breeders  of 
his  day,  sold  out  every  animal  of  the  horse  kind  that  he  pos- 
sessed and  retired  to  England.  Thus,  as  the  colonial  period 
drew  to  its  close,  the  brave  little  colonial  horse  that  had  weath- 
ered the  storms  of  a  hundred  winters  and  carried  his  master  in 
safety  and  comfort  through  all  that  time,  is  superseded  by  an- 
other race,  and  no  one  has  ever  attempted  to  write  even  so  much 
as  his  epitaph. 

As  the  contests  of  speed  considered,  up  to  this  point,  have  all 
been  at  the  running  gait,  I  must  not  close  my  review  of  this 
colony  without  giving  some  attention  to  the  pacers  and  the  trot- 
ters. At  these  gaits  all  sources  of  information  are  almost  hope- 
lessly barren  of  facts  and  incidents.  We  know  that  the  running 
horses  of  the  colonial  period  were  the  saddle  horses  of  the  coun- 
try, and  we  know  that  the  best  and  most  fashionable  saddle 
horses  were  pacers.  When  we  connect  these  two  facts  and  place 
them  alongside  of  the  pacing  and  trotting  experiences  of  Penn- 
sylvania and  New  Jersey,  we  have  no  difficulty  in  reaching  the 
safe  conclusion  that  the  same  conditions  would  produce  the  same 
results  as  in  those  two  States.  Pacing  and  trotting  contests 
were  just  as  frequent  and  as  exciting  in  this  colony  as  in  any 
other,  but  they  were  sustained  chiefly  by  road-house  keepers 
and  butchers,  and  were  never  advertised.  Matches  were  made 
one  hour  and  decided  on  the  road  in  the  next.  In  the  "Annals  of 
New  York,"  compiled  and  published  in  1832,  by  John  F.  Watson, 
we  find  the  following  curious,  but  very  valuable,  scrap  of  horse 
history : 

"  Some  twenty  or  thirty  years  before  the  Revolution,  the  steeds  most  prized 
for  the  saddle  were  pacers,  since  so  odious  deemed.  To  this  end  the  breed  was 
propagated  with  much  care.  The  Narragansett  pacers  of  Rhode  Island  were  in 
such  repute  that  they  were  sent  for,  at  much  trouble  and  expense,  by  some  few 


COLONIAL  HORSE   HISTORY — JTEW   YORK.  127 

who  were  choice  in  their  selections.  It  may  amuse  the  present  generation  to 
peruse  the  history  of  one  such  horse,  spoken  of  in  the  letter  of  Rip  Van  Dam 
of  New  York,  in  the  year  of  1711,  which  I  have  seen.  He  states  the  fact  of  the 
trouble  he  had  taken  to  procure  him  such  a  horse.  He  was  shipped  from  Rhode 
Island  in  a  sloop,  from  which  he  jumped  overboard  when  under  sail,  and  swaui 
Ashore  to  his  former  home.  Having  been  brought  back  he  arrived  in  New  York, 
in  thirteen  days'  passage,  much  reduced  in  flesh  and  spirit.  He  cost  thirty-two 
pounds  and  his  freight  fifty  shillings.  This  writer,  Rip  Van  Dam,  was  a  great 
personage,  he  having  been  president  of  the  Council  in  1731,  and  on  the  death  of 
•Governor  Montgomery  that  year,  he  was  governor,  ex-officio,  of  New  York.  His 
mural  monument  is  now  to  be  seen  in  St.  Paul's  Church." 

As  New  England  saddle  horses  were  only  worth  forty  dollars 
in  1650,  and  this  horse  cost  more  than  four  times  as  much,  when 
horses  were  more  plentiful,  we  must  conclude  that  he  was  a  fine 
specimen  of  the  breed,  and  was,  probably,  bought  for  stock  pur- 
poses. The  date  of  this  transaction  is  a  significant  fact  that 
should  not  be  forgotten,  as  1711  is  the  same  year  in  which  the 
first  of  the  two  great  founders  of  the  English  race  horse,  Darley 
Arabian,  was  brought  to  England. 


CHAPTEE  X. 

COLONIAL  HORSE   HISTORY — NEW   ENGLAND. 

First  importations  to  Boston  and  to  Salem — Importations  from  Holland; 
brought  high  prices — They  were  not  pacers  and  not  over  fourteen  hands — 
In  1640  horses  were  exported  to  the  West  Indies — First  American  news- 
paper and  first  horse  advertisement — Average  sizes — The  different  gaits 
— CONNECTICUT,  first  plantation,  1636 — Post  horses  provided  for  by  law — 
All  horses  branded — Sizes  and  Gaits — An  Englishman's  experience  with 
pacers — Lindsay's  Arabian — RHODE  ISLAND,  Founded  by  Roger  Williams, 
1636 — No  direct  importations  ever  made — Horses  largely  exported  to 
other  colonies  1690 — Possibly  some  to  Canada — Pacing  races  a  common 
amusement — Prohibited  1749 — Size  of  the  Narragansetts  compared  with 
the  Virginians. 

IN  1629  the  London  founders  of  the  plantation  of  Massachu- 
setts Bay  sent  out  six  vessels  laden  with  emigrants,  horses,  cattle, 
goats,  etc.  These  vessels  brought  some  twenty-five  head  of 
mares  and  stallions,  that  were  valued  at  six  pounds  each  and  all 
owned  by  the  company  in  London,  except  three  mares  from 
Leicester,  that  were  owned  by  private  parties.  At  that  time 
there  seems  to  have  been  some  rivalry  between  Boston  and  Salem 
as  a  shipping  point,  but  this  fleet  came  to  Boston  harbor.  This 
same  year  (1629)  Salem  seems  to  have  had  six  or  seven  mares  and 
one  stallion,  besides  forty  cows,  and  forty  goats.  From  this  it 
might  be  safely  inferred  that  a  part  of  this  fleet  put  into  Salem 
harbor,  or  that  there  may  have  been  another  and  somewhat  earlier 
shipment  of  which  we  have  no  details.  Salem  was  really 
founded  in  1626,  and  the  settlement  at  Charlestown,  Boston, 
dates  from  the  same  year.  The  next  year  about  sixty  head  were 
shipped  to  the  plantation,  but  many  were  lost  during  the  voyage, 
of  both  horses  and  cattle.  Several  other  shipments  followed,  but 
nothing  worthy  of  special  note,  till  1635,  when  two  Dutch  ships 
arrived  at  Salem  with  twenty-seven  mares,  valued  at  thirty-four 
pounds  each,  and  three  stallions.  Some  writers  have  spoken  of 
these  mares  as  "Flanders  mares,"  but  I  have  not  been  able  to 
find  any  evidence  or  even  indication  that  this  might  have  been 


COLONIAL   HOESE   HISTORY — NEW   ENGLAND.  129 

the  fact.  The  records  show  they  were  Dutch  ships,  and  that  on 
a  given  day  they  sailed  out  of  the  Texel,  a  Dutch  port,  far  away 
from  Flanders.  I  think,  therefore,  we  are  safe  in  concluding 
they  were  "Dutch  mares,"  and  they  should  be  so  designated. 
Just  about  this  period  they  were  bringing  Dutch  horses  from 
Utrecht,  in  Holland,  to  the  Dutch  colony  at  New  Amsterdam, 
and  it  was  well  known  in  Holland  as  well  as  in  New  England  that 
the  Dutch  horses  brought  much  better  prices  in  New  England 
than  the  English  importations.  It  is  probable,  further,  that 
these  Dutch  traders  were  looking  out  for  a  choice  of  markets,  as 
between  New  England  and  New  Netherlands.  These  mares  were 
valued  at  thirty-five  pounds  each,  the  record  says,  but  we  are  not 
informed  as  to  the  price  that  was  really  paid  for  them.  There  is 
a  very  wide  discrepancy  between  the  figure  at  which  these  mares 
were  "valued"  and  the  cost  of  the  mares  that  were  brought  from 
England.  The  English  company  charged  the  colony  six  pounds 
each  for  the  horses  sent  from  there,  and  ten  pounds  freight. 

I  have  labored  assiduously  to  get  at  such  data  as  would  afford 
a  safe  basis  upon  which  to  determine  the  size  and  other  qualities 
of  these  Dutch  horses.  They  were  larger  than  the  English  horses 
of  that  period  and  they  were  more  muscular,  with  greater  weight 
of  bone.  They  were,  doubtless,  better  adapted  to  the  various 
offices  of  the  "general  purpose"  horse  than  their  English  con- 
temporaries, in  every  respect,  except  the  saddle.  There  is  no 
distinctive  evidence  that  they  were  pacers  or  could  go  any  of  the 
saddle  gaits,  in  their  own  right.  It  is  probably  safe  to  conclude 
that  the  original  importations  would  not  average  more  than  four- 
teen and  a  half  hands  high,  and  very  likely  the  exact  truth,  if  it 
could  be  reached,  would  place  them  below  that  figure  rather  than 
above  it.  The  process  of  reducing  the  size  commenced  as  soon  as 
they  arrived:  for  the  English  horses  had  saddle  qualities  which 
the  Dutch  did  not  possess,  and  everybody  wanted  a  saddle  horse. 
Still  the  Dutch  blood  was  highly  prized,  and  a  hundred  and  fifty 
years  afterward  it  was  no  uncommon  thing,  especially  in  the 
valley  of  the  Connecticut,  to  meet  with  the  advertisements  of 
stallions  seeking  patronage  on  the  strength  of  "Dutch  blood." 
This,  for  a  time,  was  a  puzzle  to  me,  but  as  we  consider  the  horse 
interests  of  the  region  of  the  Hudson  and  the  Mohawk  Valley 
extending  eastward  and  that  of  eastern  Massachusetts  extending 
westward  along  with  the  current  of  emigration,  it  is  not  difficult 
to  understand  how  the  blood  of  the  Dutch  horse  should  have  be- 


130  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

come  so  generally  diffused.  On  the  one  hand  we  had  the  much- 
desired  saddle  qualities,  and  on  the  other  we  had  the  much-de- 
sired increase  of  size  without  deterioration  in  appearance.  Thus 
owners  were  accommodated  and  the  horse  stock  of  the  country 
was  improved  by  the  interbreeding  of  the  two  nationalities.  It 
is  not  necessary  to  further  particularize  different  importations. 
It  is  sufficient  to  say  that  they  were  very  numerous,  and  the  mul- 
tiplying of  the  stock  was  carried  forward  with  vigor  and  success. 
Five  years  later — 1640 — the  colonists  not  only  had  all  the  horses 
they  needed,  but  they  shipped  a  cargo  of  eighty  head  to  Barba- 
does.  From  the  colony  of  Massachusetts  Bay  all  the  plantations 
of  New  England  secured  their  foundation  stock  of  horses,  hence 
they  are  here  considered  collectively. 

The  people  of  the  Plymouth  plantation  were  very  slow  in  pro- 
viding themselves  with  horses,  and  it  was  not  till  after  1632  that 
they  had  any.  It  is  hard  to  conceive  of  a  colony  like  that  of 
Massachusetts  Bay  living  and  flourishing  for  a  period  of,  say, 
eighty  years  without  a  newspaper,  and  yet  such  is  the  fact.  The 
Boston  News-Letter,  the  first  newspaper,  so  called,  in  this  coun- 
try, was  established  May  29,  1704,  and  it  lived  many  years.  The 
early  colonial  newspapers,  from  one  end  of  the  land  to  the  other, 
were  anything  and  everything  but  newspapers,  as  we  understand 
the  meaning  of  the  title  in  our  day.  If  a  boy  fell  off  a  building 
in  London  and  broke  his  leg,  six  weeks  before,  it  was  liable  to 
appear  as  an  item  of  "news"  in  the  local  American  newspaper, 
but  if  the  same  accident  happened  the  week  before,  in  a  neigh- 
boring town,  it  was  never  mentioned.  The  name  "newspaper" 
attached  to  such  publications  was  a  fraud. 

The  following  is  a  copy  of  the  first  horse  advertisement  ever 
published  in  this  country,  and  for  that  reason  it  is  worthy  of  pres- 
ervation. It  was  taken  from  the  Boston  News-Letter  of  Novem- 
ber 19,  1705: 

"  Strayed  from  Mr.  John  Wilson  of  Braintree,  at  Mr.  Havens'  in  Kingston, 
in  Narragansett,  about  a  fortnight  ago,  a  sorrel  mare,  low  stature,  four  white 
feet,  a  white  face,  shod  all  round,  her  near  ear  tore,  has  a  long  white  tail  and 
mane.  Whoever  will  give  any  intelligence  of  her  .  .  .  will  be  sufficiently 
rewarded." 

As  this  was  in  the  period  when  the  Narragansett  pacers  had 
reached  their  greatest  fame,  we  might  argue  that  this  mare  had  been 
sent  down  to  Kingston  from  Braintree,  Massachusetts,  to  be  win- 


COLONIAL   HORSE   HISTORY — NEW   ENGLAND.  131 

tered  and  to  be  bred  in  the  spring  to  some  famous  horse  in 
Kingston,  the  very  center  of  the  horse-breeding  interests  of  that 
day. 

Under  the  date  of  June  17,  1706,  I  find  a  bay  horse  advertised 
as  "strayed  or  stolen:  fourteen  hands  high,  hardly  possible  to 
make  him  gallop,"  and  October  28,  1700,  a  black  gelding  "four- 
teen hands  high,  paces,  trots,  and  gallops."  Then  in  the  years 
1731  and  1732  I  find  a  "black  mare  fourteen  and  three-quarter 
hands,  trots  and  paces;"  a  "black  horse  twelve  hands,"  no  gait 
given:  "black  gelding,  fourteen  hands,  races,  trots,  and  gallops:" 
"bay  horse  large,  good  pacer:"  "roan  mare,  fourteen  hands, 
paces  and  trots."  But  the  field  which  I  specially  gleaned  was 
for  the  years  1756-59,  where  I  found  the  average  height  was 
fourteen  hands  one  inch,  the  data  including  eight  pacers  and  two 
trotters.  This,  I  think,  may  be  taken  as  fairly  representative  of 
the  size  and  habit  of  action  of  Massachusetts  horses  in  the  first 
half  of  the  eighteenth  century. 

In  1636  the  first  plantation  was  made  in  Connecticut  at  Hart- 
ford by  the  Rev.  Thomas  Hooker  and  over  a  hundred  of  his  con- 
gregation with  him.  They  left  nothing  behind,  but  brought  all 
their  domestic  animals  to  their  new  home.  I  have  not  been  able 
to  discover  just  how  many  horses  they  brought  with  them,  but  in 
a  few  decades  they  had  a  great  abundance  and  to  spare.  In  1653 
the  General  Court  at  New  Haven  made  provision  for  keeping 
public  saddle  horses  for  hire  and  fixed  the  rate  of  charges  for 
their  use.  It  also  prohibited  the  sale  of  horses  outside  of  the 
colony.  In  1658  all  horses,  young  and  old,  had  to  be  .branded  by 
an  officer  appointed  for  that  purpose,  and  it  required  several 
years  of  legislation  before  the  system  of  branding,  selling  and  re- 
cording could  be  so  perfected  as  to  prevent  dishonesty  and  frauds. 
In  1674  an  act  was  passed  providing  and  enjoining  that  all  colts 
entire  and  stallions  running  at  large,  under  thirteen  hands  high, 
should  be  gelded.  This  law  al$o  required  a  good  deal  of  amend: 
ing  before  it  could  be  made  to  work  smoothly.  The  size  of  the 
Connecticut  horses  about  the  time  of  the  Revolution  was  an 
average  of  thirteen  hands  three  inches,  thus  ranging  below  the 
other  New  England  colonies.  In  1778  horse  racing  was  pro- 
hibited under  the  penalty  of  forfeiture  of  the  horse  and  a  fine  of 
forty  shillings.  In  1776  a  careful  compilation  of  the  gaits  of  the 
horses  of  that  period,  embracing  nineteen  individuals,  taken  as 
they  came,  showed  that  fifteen  were  pacers,  or  pacers  and  trotters, 


132  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

and  four  were  trotters  only.  As  an  evidence  of  the  quality  of  the 
Connecticut  pacers,  take  the  following  passage  from  a  little 
volume  published  1769,  in  England,  entitled  "A  Voyage  to  North 
America/7  by  G.  Taylor,  Sheffield,  England,  1768-69: 

"  After  dinner  at  New  London,  Conn.,  Mr.  Williams  and  I  took  post  horses, 
with  a  guide  to  New  Haven.  Their  horses  are,  in  general  of  less  size  than 
ours,  but  extremely  stout  and  hardy.  A  man  will  ride  the  same  horse  a  hun- 
dred miles  a  day,  for  several  days  together,  in  a  journey  of  five  or  eight  hun- 
dred miles,  perhaps,  and  the  horse  is  never  cleaned.  Tuey  naturally  pace, 
though  in  no  graceful  or  easy  manner,  but  with  such  swiftness  and  for  so  long- 
a  continuance  as  luust  seem  incredible  to  those  who  have  not  proved  it  by 
experience." 

This  is  a  very  different  view  of  the  pacer  from  that  expressed 
by  another  Englishman  who  visited  Virginia  in  1796.  He  had 
never  seen  a  pacer  before  and  he  was  wholly  unwilling  to  believe 
his  host  when  he  assured  him  it  was  a  natural  gait  and  that  many 
colts  paced  from  the  day  they  were  foaled.  This,  to  the  mind  of 
the  Englishman  could  not  be  true,  he  says,  "for  none  of  our 
horses  ever  move  in  that  manner."  (See  Virginia,  pp.  117-118). 

The  most  noted  horse  ever  owned  in  Connecticut,  at  least  in 
colonial  days,  was  the  horse  named  and  known  in  later  times  as- 
Lindsay's  Arabian.  When  I  was  younger  I  accepted  the  marvel- 
ous story  of  the  origin  and  early  history  of  this  horse,  of  which  a, 
brief  account  is  given  in  the  chapter  on  the  "American  Kace 
Horse,"  to  which  reference  is  here  made.  This  acceptance  on 
my  part  of  the  romantic  story  was  largely  superinduced  by  a 
statement  made  by  a  justice  of  the  Supreme  Court  of  the  United 
States,  that  he  had  examined  the  animal  when  he  was  old  and 
found  on  three  of  his  legs  undoubted  physical  evidence  that  they 
had  at  one  time  been  broken.  This  appeared  in  a  reputable 
publication,  but  when  compared  with  some  other  facts  in  the 
history  of  the  horse  that  are  known,  there  can  hardly  be  a  doubt 
that  the  examination  by  the  justice  was  a  fiction.  When  I  began 
to  realize  that  the  marvelous  story  was  a  mere  fiction  my  "wrath 
waxed  hot"  against  the  people  of  "'the  land  of  steady  habits,"  to- 
say  nothing  of  "wooden  nutmegs,"  until  Mr.  0.  W.  Cook  made 
it  very  plain  that  the  people  of  Connecticut  never  had  heard  of 
the  remarkable  story.  (See  Wallace's  Monthly,  Vol.  VI.,  p.  251). 
Thus  it  became  evident  that  the  whole  story  had  been  fabricated 
in  Maryland  and  was  a  kind  of  "green  goods"  method  for  catch- 
ing the  unwary.  These  are  my  apologies  to  the  general  public 


COLONIAL   HOUSE   HISTORY — NEW   ENGLAND.  133 

and  especially  to  the  Connecticut  public  for  supposing  them 
guilty  of  any  such  fraud.  The  naked  truth  of  the  matter  is, 
that  while  this  horse  may  have  been  imported  from  England,  his 
public  advertisements  clearly  indicate  that  his  owners  knew  noth- 
ing of  his  blood  or  early  history. 

The  colony  of  Rhode  Island  was  planted  by  Roger  Williams 
and  his  followers  in  1636,  and  the  first  patent  giving  it  a-  legal 
existence  was  obtained  1647.  It  was  an  offshoot  from  Massachu- 
setts and  a  protest  against  the  intolerance  of  that  colony  in  re- 
ligious affairs.  For  several  years  I  made  renewed  and  persistent 
efforts  to  discover  whether  in  the  early  colonial  period  Rhode 
Island  had  ever  imported  any  horses  from  foreign  countries,  and 
after  exhausting  every  source  of  recorded  information,  I  have 
not  been  able  to  find  a  single  intimation  of  such  importation. 
It  is  evident,  therefore,  that  the  famous  Narragansett  pacer  is 
simply  the  result  of  carefully  selecting  and  breeding  from  the 
best  and  the  fastest  of  the  descendants  of  the  English  pacers,  to 
~be  found  everywhere  in  the  colony  of  Massachusetts.  The 
superiority  of  the  Narragansett  pacer  over  all  others  of  his  kind 
seemed  to  suggest  the  probability  that  he  must  have  possessed 
blood  that  was  superior  to  all  others,  and  to  supply  this  "want," 
a  Rhode  Islander  advanced  the  claim  that  his  grandfather  had 
imported  the  original  stock  from  Spain.  Unfortunately  for  this 
"claim"  there  were  two  difficulties  in  the  way  of  accepting  it. 
First,  there  were  no  pacers  in  Spain,  and  second,  the  Narragan- 
sett  pacers  were  famous  for  their  speed  and  value  before  the 
grandfather  was  born,  or  at  least  before  he  was  out  of  his  swad- 
dling clothes. 

The  horse  interests  of  Rhode  Island  seem  to  have  been  active 
and  successful  from  the  very  founding  of  the  colony,  and  the 
fame  of  her  pacers  extended  to  all  the  American  colonies  at  a 
very  early  day.  When  the  authorities  made  their  report  to  the 
Board  of  Trade  at  London,  in  1690,  showing  what  they  had  pro- 
duced and  where  and  how  they  had  disposed  of  their  surplus, 
they  place  horses  at  the  head  of  their  products  and  state  that 
they  are  shipped  to  all  the  English  colonies  on  the  American 
coast.  This  statement  is  sustained  by  corresponding  facts  that 
are  known  in  New  York,  Pennsylvania,  and  Virginia.  Trading 
with  the  French  colonies  in  Canada  was  rigorously  prohibited, 
but  it  is  quite  probable  that  many  a  good  pacing  horse  found  his 
"way  to  the  St.  Lawrence  in  exchange  for  pelts  and  furs.  But, 


134  THE   HOUSE    OF   AMEKICA. 

as  the  Narragansett  and  the  pacer  generally  will  be  fully  con- 
sidered in  another  part  of  this  volume,  the  reader  is  referred  to- 
the  chapters  wholly  devoted  to  those  topics. 

That  racing  was  a  common  amusement  of  the  people  of  Ehode 
Island  is  fully  established  by  the  very  best  of  contemporaneous 
evidence,  and  by  the  silver  plate  prizes  won,  that  are  said  to  be  still 
in  existence  in  some  of  the  old  families.  Attempts  have  been 
made  to  laugh  this  statement  out  of  court,  on  the  grounds  that 
Khode  Island  was  a  Puritan  colony,  and  such  a  thing  as  a  horse 
race  would  not  be  tolerated  for  a  single  day.  This  attempt  shows 
a  great  deal  more  smartness  than  knowledge,  for  Ehode  Island 
was  not  a  Puritan  colony,  as  that  term  is  generally  understood, 
but  had  for  its  very  foundation  opposition  to  the  spirit  of  intoler- 
ance that  prevailed  in  all  the  other  New  England  colonies.  But, 
what  is  still  more  conclusive,  the  legislature  of  the  colony  in 
1749  enacted  a  law  prohibiting  all  racing,  under  a  penalty  of 
forfeiture  of  the  horse  and  a  fine  of  one  hundred  dollars.  As  in 
other  colonies  not  in  New  England  racing  and  betting  had  be- 
come so  common  that  the  moral  sense  of  the  people  rose  up  and 
abolished  it.  If  there  had  been  no  racing  there  would  have  been 
no  law  to  wipe  it  out. 

When  the  Rev.  Dr.  McSparran,  of  Rhode  Island,  made  a  trip  in 
Virginia  and  rode  the  Virginia  pacers  some  hundreds  of  miles, 
early  in  the  last  century,  he  seems  to  have  observed  them  closely 
and  spoke  very  highly  of  them,  but  he  said  they  were  not  so 
large  and  strong  as  the  Narragansetts,  nor  so  easy  and  gliding  in 
their  action.  It  might  be  suggested  that  this  opinion  was  the 
natural  result  of  esteeming  one's  own  as  better  than  those  of  a 
neighbor,  but  he  was  certainly  right  in  the  matter  of  size.  In 
1768  the  Rhode  Island  horses  averaged  fourteen  hands  one 
inch,  while  the  Virginia  horses  averaged  (1750-52)  thirteen  hands 
one  and  three-quarter  inches,  making  a  difference  of  three  and 
one-quarter  inches  in  height.  In  the  matter  of  gait  they  were 
not  all  natural  pacers,  for  out  of  thirty-five  there  were  eight  that 
did  not  pace,  and  some  of  the  others  both  paced  and  trotted. 
From  this  it  may  be  inferred  that  breeders,  in  order  to  increase 
the  size,  had  incorporated  more  or  less  of  the  blood  of  the  early 
Dutch  importations. 


CHAPTER    XL 

COLONIAL  HORSE   HISTORY — PENNSYLVANIA,  NEW  JERSEY, 
MARYLAND,    CAROLINA. 

Penn's  arrival  in  1682 — Horse  racing  prohibited — Franklin's  newspaper — 
Conestoga  horses — Sizes  and  gaits — Sweedish  origin — Acrelius'  statement. 
NEW  JERSEY — Branding — Increase  of  size — Racing,  Pacing,  and  Trotting 
restricted — MARYLAND — Racing  and  pacing  restricted  1747 — Stallions  of 
under  size  t<>  be  shot.  NORTH  CAROLINA — First  settlers  refugees — SOUTH 
CAROLINA — Size  and  gait  in  1744 — Challenges — No  running  blood  in  the 
colony  1744 — General  view. 

WHEN  William  Penn  arrived  on  this  side  of  the  water  (1682) 
and  took  possession  of  his  princely  gift  from  Charles  II.,  he 
found  the  eastern  border  of  his  new  province  already  occupied, 
though  sparsely,  by  an  industrious  and  enterprising  people. 
The  old  Swedish  colonists  as  well  as  a  sprinkling  of  Englishmen 
and  other  nationalities  had  been  there  for  a  good  many  years,  and 
were  beginning  to  get  the  necessaries  as  well  as  the  comforts  of 
life  about  them.  For  their  numbers,  they  had  a  fair  supply  of 
horses,  cattle,  sheep,  and  swine;  and  the  growing  of  cereals  and 
fruits  of  all  kinds  showed  encouraging  progress,  with  the 
promise  of  plenty.  The  new  proprietor  was  gladly  welcomed 
and  his  rule  proved  kindly  and  beneficent.  In  a  letter  to  Lord 
Ormonde,  after  his  arrival,  Mr.  Penn,  in  describing  the  condition 
of  things  in  his  new  colony,  says:  "The  horses  are  not  very  hand- 
some, but  good."  The  public  affairs  of  Penn's  grant,  before  his 
arrival,  had  been  administered  in  the  name  of  the  Duke  of  York, 
from  about  the  time  New  Amsterdam  had  surrendered  to  the 
English,  and  hence  we  find  sundry  regulations  with  regard  to 
the  horse  in  force  before  that  event. 

The  first  of  these,  having  the  efficacy  of  law,  was  in  the  year 
1676,  requiring  all  horses  to  be  branded,  and  officers  appointed 
to  do  the  branding  and  keep  a  record  of  the  fact.  Besides  the 
individual  brands,  each  town  had  its  own  brand  that  had  to  be 
applied  ,and  by  this  double  marking  it  was  supposed  that  strays 


136  THE   HOUSE   OF   AMEKICA, 

could  be  identified  with  certainty.  Another  provision  was  that 
no  mares  should  be  exported  to  Virginia  or  Barbadoes  or  other 
foreign  plantations.  Again,  every  owner  was  supposed  to  keep 
a  certain  number  of  horses  at  home,  for  daily  use,  and  he  was 
allowed  to  keep  twice  that  number  running  at  large.  In  1682  no 
stone  horse  under  thirteen  and  one-half  hands  high  was  allowed 
to  run  at  large.  This  was  afterward  changed  to  thirteen  bands. 
In  1724  this  law  was  revised  and  re-enacted  so  that  colts  "of 
comely  proportions"  and  not  more  than  one  year  and  a  half  old, 
if  thirteen  hands  high,  might  run  at  large;  but  if  older  than 
eighteen  months  they  must  be  fourteen  hands  high  or  suffer  the 
penalty,  which  was  castration.  In  1750  horse  racing  of  all  kinds 
was  prohibited,  under  a  severe  penalty. 

In  that  grand  old  repository  of  ancient,  curious,  and  valuable 
things  relating  to  colonial  affairs,  the  New  York  Historical 
Society,  to  which  I  am  greatly  indebted,  I  found  a  file  of  the 
Pennsylvania  Gazette,  commencing  with  the  year  1729,  published 
by  "B.  Franklin,  printer."  In  that  day  the  term  "editor"  or 
"reporter"  was  not  known  in  the  vocabulary  of  any  well-regu- 
lated newspaper  office,  and  for  anything  of  a  local  character  you 
had  to  look  in  the  advertising  columns.  To  these  I  resorted,  as 
usual,  and  they  presented  results  that  were  a  great  surprise  to 
me.  Pennsylvania  has  long  been  famous  for  the  production  of 
great  massive  draft  horses,  and  before  the  days  of  railroads  just 
suited,  with  six  or  eight  of  them  in  a  team,  for  the  transporta- 
tion of  freights  from  the  seaboard  to  the  Ohio  River.  This  was 
a  great  business  at  the  beginning  of  this  century  and  for  forty  or 
fifty  years  afterward.  The  fame  of  those  great  teams,  the  great 
wagons  and  the  great  loads  they  hauled  over  the  mountains, 
spread  far  and  wide,  and  as  a  special  designation  that  went  with 
them  they  were  called  Conestoga  horses,  and  the  wagons  were 
called  Conestoga  wagons,  named  after  a  creek  in  Lancaster  County, 
Pennsylvania,  where  many  large  horses  were  bred.  There  was  no 
particular  line  of  blood  to  be  followed,  for  a  large  horse  bred  west 
of  the  mountains  was  just  as  certainly  a  Conestoga  as  though  he 
had  been  bred  in  Lancaster  County.  The  Conestoga  was  simply 
the  horse  that  was  best  suited  for  a  big  team  with  an  enormous 
load,  and  he  varied  in  size  from  sixteen  and  one-half  to  eighteen 
hands  in  height  and  from  one  thousand  six  hundred  to  one 
thousand  nine  hundred  pounds  in  weight.  These  measurements 
he  reached  by  breeding  for  the  one  purpose  of  strength  and 


COLONIAL    HORSE    HISTORY — PENNSYLVANIA,    ETC. 

weight.  It  is  safe  to  conclude  that  in  the  latter  part  of  the  last 
century  breeding  animals  of  large  size  were  brought  over  the 
water,  for  we  can  hardly  conceive  of  their  being  descended  from 
the  little  pacers  preceding  them  only  fifty  or  sixty  years. 

The  Pennsylvania  horses  of  the  first  half  of  the  last  century 
were  remarkably  uniform  in  size,  and  from  a  large  number  of 
cases  in  which  the  size  is  given  I  find  the  exact  average  was 
thirteen  hands  one  and  one-quarter  inches.  Of  the  twenty-eight 
animals  in  which  the  habit  of  action  is  given,  twenty-four  were 
pacers,  three  both  paced  and  trotted,  and  just  one  is  given  as  a 
natural  trotter.  Here  we  have  two  very  striking  facts — the  low 
stature  and  the  uniformity  of  the  pacing  gait.  These  horses 
average  a  quarter  of  an  inch  below  the  Virginians,  the  next  low- 
est, and  a  higher  ratio  of  pacers  than  in  any  other  colony.  There 
must  have  been  some  reason  or  reasons  for  this,  and  I  will  sug- 
gest two  which  strike  me  as  probably  effective  in  producing  these 
results.  The  earliest  settlers  in  Southeastern  Pennsylvania  were 
the  Swedes.  They  brought  their  horses  with  them  from  the  Old 
World,  and  they  were  undoubtedly  pacers,  but  I  have  no  means 
of  determining  anything  about  their  size.  This  may  be  an  im- 
portant factor  in  determining  the  uniformity  of  the  gait,  as  well 
as  the  diminutive  size.  The  other  consideration  that  I  will 
present  is  the  fact  that  the  pacer  was  more  fashionable  in  and 
about  Philadelphia,  then  the  leading  city  of  the  continent,  than 
in  any  other  section  or  portion  of  the  colonies.  It  is  a  fact  that 
seems  to  be  fully  established,  that  early  in  the  last  century  the 
breeding  of  pacing  horses  was  carried  on  in  the  region  of  Phila- 
delphia, with  much  spirit  and  intelligence,  and  that  pacing 
stallions  for  public  service  were  carefully  selected  for  their  shape- 
linesss  and  speed.  It  is  also  a  fact  that  all  horses  that  could  not 
pace  were,  in  the  public  estimation,  classed  as  basely  bred. 

The  Swedes  and  Finns  planted  a  colony  on  the  west  bank  of 
the  Delaware  in  1638,  and  as  they  were  an  industrious  and 
thrifty  people  they  prospered  and  extended  their  plantation  up 
the  river  as  far  as  Philadelphia.  This  territory  was  then  claimed 
by  the  Dutch  of  New  Netherlands,  and  they  overcame  the 
Swedes  in  1655,  and  ten  years  later  they  in  turn  had  to  surren- 
der to  the  English.  Of  the  early  Swedes,  the  Rev.  Acrelius 
wrote  and  published,  in  the  Swedish  language,  a  very  valuable 
account  of  his  people.  In  speaking  of  their  horses  he  says:  "The 
horses  are  real  ponies  and  are  seldom  over  sixteen  hands  high 


138  THE    HOESE    OF    AMERICA. 

[evidently  a  misprint  and  should  read  "thirteen"  instead  of 
"sixteen"].  He  who  has  a  good  riding  horse  never  employs  him 
lor  draft;  which  is  also  the  less  necessary,  as  journeys  are  for  the 
most  part  made  on  horseback.  It  must  be  the  result  of  this, 
more  than  of  any  particular  breed  in  the  horses,  that  the  country 
excels  in  fast  horses,  so  that  horse  races  are  often  made  for  very 
high  stakes."  Such  horses  often  sold  for  sixty  dollars  in  our 
modern  money.  The  question  of  the  pacers  of  Philadelphia  will 
be  considered  more  at  length  in  the  chapters  devoted  to  the  his- 
tory of  the  pacer. 

NEW  JERSEY  is  not  known  to  have  made  any  direct  importa- 
tions of  horses  from  the  old  country.  Lying  between  New  York 
on  the  east  and  Pennsylvania  on  the  west,  she  had  abundant  op- 
portunity to  get  her  supply  of  horses  from  her  neighbors  on 
either  side,  to  say  nothing  of  the  overflow  from  Virginia  about 
1669.  Like  all  the  other  colonies,  as  early  as  1668  her  horses 
were  ordered  to  be  branded  and  then  suffered  to  roam  at  large 
and  find  their  own  living.  Not  much  attention  seems  to  have 
been  given  to  the  idea  of  improvement  in  the  size  and  quality  of 
the  stock  till  1731,  when  it  was  provided  by  law  that  all  colts  of 
eighteen  months  old,  running  at  large  and  under  fourteen  hands 
high,  should  be  gelded.  I  have  not  made  any  attempt  to  get  at 
the  exact  average  size  of  the  Jersey  horses,  nor  to  ascertain  the 
ratio  of  pacers  among  them,  for  we  know  the  environments  and 
the  sources  of  supply,  and  in  knowing  these  we  know  just  what 
the  Jersey  horses  were — a  large  majority  of  them  were  pacers  and 
they  were  not  over  fourteen  hands  high. 

The  statutes  of  this  colony,  enacted  1748,  furnished  the  first 
real  evidence  of  record,  with  one  exception,  going  to  show  that 
pacing  arid  trotting  races,  as  well  as  running  races,  were  the  com- 
mon amusement  of  the  people  in  the  first  half  of  the  last  cen- 
tury. They  were  so  common,  indeed,  that  the  legislative  authori- 
ties declared  them  a  nuisance  and  restricted  them  to  certain  days 
in  the  year.  That  this  was  not  a  "moral  spasm,"  as  some  might 
call  it,  that  had  seized  the  legislative  authorities  of  that  particu- 
lar year,  is  evident  from  the  fact  that,  afterward  and  from  time 
to  time,  this  statute  was  amended,  and  always  in  the  direction  of 
greater  restrictions  and  greater  severity.  This  is  sufficient  evi- 
dence that  the  moral  sense  of  the  community  sustained  the  law- 
makers in  pronouncing  it  a  nuisance,  to  be  abated.  It  is  not 
probable  that  pacing  and  trotting  races  were  any  more  common 


COLONIAL   HORSE   HISTORY — PENNSYLVANIA,    ETC.  139 

or  more  demoralizing  in  New  Jersey  than  in  some  of  the  other 
oolonies,  but  they  seem  to  have  been  content  with  fulminating 
against  "horse  racing"  without  specifying  the  different  gaits  at 
which  the  horses  might  go  in  the  race.  Until  this  old  colonial 
statute  was  discovered,  it  was  not  possible  to  prove  by  contem- 
poraneous evidence  that  there  had  been  any  pacing  or  trotting 
races  before  the  first  decade  of  the  present  century.  This,  how- 
ever, adds  to  their  antiquity  more  than  a  hundred  years. 

MARYLAND  was  really  the  first  in  point  of  time  to  legislate  for 
the  suppression  of  pacing,  as  well  as  running  races,  but  the  old 
statute,  enacted  in  1747,  was  not  discovered  till  very  recently. 
This  proves  that  pacing  races  were  very  common  in  Maryland  one 
hundred  and  sixty  years  ago,  but  it  says  nothing  about  trotting 
races.  It  will  be  observed  that  in  the  New  Jersey  statute  the 
different  kinds  of  racing  are  placed  in  this  order:  "Racing,  pac- 
ing and  trotting,"  and  I  take  this  to  mean  the  order  of  their 
prominence.  Applying  this  method  to  Maryland,  it  may  be  in- 
ferred that  trotting  races  were  infrequent  and  practically  un- 
known, and  hence  not  enumerated  as  offensive.  Taking  these  two 
cases  together,  I  think  we  are  justified  in  concluding  that  the 
pacer  antedated  and  preceded  the  trotter  in  all  turf  sports.  No 
doubt  he  was  faster  then  than  the  trotter,  and  he  has  maintained 
his  superiority,  in  that  respect  at  least,  to  this  day.  Maryland 
was  a  great  racing  colony  and  it  was  afterward  a  great  racing 
State.  This  statute  did  not  sweep  over  the  whole  colony,  but 
applied  only  to  the  race  course  at  Newmarket,  and  Anne  Arundel 
and  Talbot  counties.  As  I  understand  the  matter,  this  statute 
was  enacted  specially  at  the  request  of  the  Society  of  Friends, 
and  for  the  protection  of  their  yearly  meetings. 

With  Pennsylvania  on  the  one  side  and  Virginia  on  the  other, 
it  is  not  necessary  to  spend  any  time  on  the  sizes  and  gaits  of  the 
horses  of  Maryland,  for  they  were  simply  duplicates  of  those  in 
the  two  colonies  with  which  they  were  in  constant  intercourse 
and  trade.  In  the  matter  of  undersized  stallions  running  at 
large  Maryland  was  more  in  earnest  and  more  savage  than  any  of 
the  other  colonies.  For,  by  an  act  of  Legislature,  passed  1715, 
it  was  provided  that  any  person  finding  an  entire  colt  eighteen 
months  old,  or  an  unbroken  stoned  horse,  running  at  large,  no  dif- 
ference what  his  size,  might  shoot  him  upon  the  spot. 

NORTH  CAROLINA  was  first  permanently  settled  by  a  colony  from 
Virginia,  led  by  Roger  Green,  July,  1653.  For  some  years  pre- 


140  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

vious  to  this  it  had  been  the  refuge  of  Quakers  and  others  fleeing 
from  the  persecutions  and  proscriptions  that  prevailed  in  Virginia 
at  that  time,  against  all  who  did  not  conform  to  the  ritual  of  the 
English  church.  These  refugees  and  colonists  took  their  horses 
and  all  they  had  with  them,  and  as  this  was  but  a  few  years  be- 
fore there  was  an  overproduction  of  horses  in  Virginia,  and  great 
droves  were  running  wild  without  an  owner,  we  may  conclude 
they  cost  but  little  and  that  they  spread  rapidly  in  the  new 
colony.  As  we  thus  know  whence  they  came,  we  necessarily 
know  what  they  were  in  size  and  gait,  and  we  need  not  trace 
them  any  further. 

SOUTH  CAROLINA  received  her  colonial  charter  in  1663,  and  the 
earliest  newspaper  that  I  have  found  was  for  the  year  1744,  from  the 
advertisements  in  which  I  have  extracted  the  following  data  as  to 
size  and  gait.  In  the  first  four  and  the  last  four  months  of  the 
South  Carolina  Gazette  for  1744  I  find  thirty  horses  advertised 
as  strayed  or  stolen,  in  which  the  size  is  given,  and  they  average 
within  a  small  fraction  of  an  inch  of  thirteen  and  one-half  hands, 
and  of  this  number  three  are  given  as  fifteen  hands,  which  was 
considered,  in  that  day,  a  large  horse.  Out  of  this  number  the 
gait  is  given  in  only  twelve  cases,  ten  of  which  were  pacers,  one 
paced  and  trotted,  and  one  trotted  only.  The  foundation  horse 
stock  of  South  Carolina  was  obtained  chiefly,  if  not  wholly,  from 
Virginia,  and  the  practice  of  branding  and  turning  out,  to  roam 
at  large,  prevailed  everywhere. 

In  the  issues  of  the  Gaiette  for  this  year  (1744)  I  find  but  one 
advertisement  of  a  stallion  for  public  service,  and  he  is  called  the 
"famous  racing  horse  named  Roger,"  and  is  advertised  as  a  great 
race  horse,  but  there  is  no  attempt  to  give  a  pedigree  or  to  claim 
that  he  possessed  any  blood  that  was  not  the  inheritance  of  all 
others.  Another  advertisement  is  a  lengthy  challenge  from 
Joseph  Butler  to  run  his  gelding  Chestnut  against  any  horse, 
mare  or  gelding  for  five  hundred  or  one  thousand  pounds  "inch 
and  weight,"  the  lowest  horse  carrying  thirteen  stone.  No  men- 
tion or  reference  is  made  to  his  blood,  and  from  these  two  facts 
we  may  reasonably  infer  that  at  that  time  there  were  no  strains 
of  blood,  known  to  the  Carolinians,  specially  bred  to  run.  The 
distance  to  be  run  is  not  definitely  mentioned,  but  it  was  on  a 
road  from  one  point  to  another,  and  I  suppose  it  was  about  two 
and  a  half,  or  possibly  three  miles.  This  was  three  years  before 
the  first  English  race  horse  was  imported  into  Virginia.  It  has 


COLONIAL   HORSE   HISTORY — PENNSYLVANIA,    ETC.  141 

been  represented  that  an  old  gentleman,  whose  name  is  forgotten, 
imported  into  South  Carolina  a  number  of  English  race  horses  at 
a  period  long  anterior  to  this,  but  that  claim  has  never  been  in  a 
shape  that  placed  it  above  very  grave  suspicion  and  doubt;  and 
the  claim  accompanying  it,  in  the  way  of  apology,  that  the  old 
man  would  never  allow  any  of  his  horses  to  race,  did  not  improve 
its  credibility.  From  the  advertisements  just  referred  to,  it 
seems  evident  that  there  was  no  distinctively  English  running 
blood  in  the  colony  till  after  this  date. 

This  review  of  the  horses  of  the  colonial  period  embraces  all 
that  I  have  been  able  to  glean  of  the  character,  qualifications, 
size  and  habit  of  action  of  the  earliest  importations  and  their  de- 
scendants. Their  diminutive  size  will  be  a  surprise  to  my  read- 
ers as  it  has  been  to  me,  and  the  overwhelming  ratio  of  pacers  to 
trotters  will  be  a  still  greater  surprise.  The  importance  of  in- 
creasing the  size  by  judicious  selections  of  the  largest  seems  to 
liave  been  ever  present  to  the  minds  of  the  colonists,  but  not 
much  could  be  accomplished  in  that  direction,  under  the  system 
prevalent  everywhere  of  roaming  at  large.  The  little  pacers 
were  great  saddle  horses,  and  down  to  the  days  of  good  roads  and 
wheeled  vehicles  they  were  deemed  indispensable.  That  there 
were  race  horses  among  them  at  the  running,  pacing  and  trotting 
gaits  there  is  indisputable  evidence,  covering  about  a  hundred 
years  of  the  colonial  period,  but  there  is  no  record  of  the  rate  of 
speed.  The  pacer  was  the  favorite  and  fashionable  horse  of  that 
period,  and  after  something  has  been  said  about  the  Canadian 
horse  we  will  take  up  his  history  and  treat  it  with  that  fullness 
its  importance  demands. 


CHAPTEK  XII. 

EARLY   HORSE    HISTORY — CANADA. 

Settlement  and  capture  of  Port  Royal — Early  plantations — First  French 
horses  brought  over  1665 — Possibly  illicit  trading — Sire  of  "  Old  Tippoo  'r 
— His  history — "  Scape  Goat"  and  his  descendants — Horses  of  the  Mari- 
time Provinces. 

BEFORE  taking  up  the  two  provinces  of  the  Dominion — Quebec 
and  Ontario — to  which  reference  is  made  in  this  volume  as. 
"Canada,"  there  is  an  incident  in  the  history  of  Nova  Scotia, 
full  of  sadness,  that  I  cannot  pass  over  without  mention.  The 
French  made  a  settlement  here  in  1602,  and  named  the  country 
New  France.  The  settlement  to  which  I  refer  was  at  Port  Eoyal, 
afterward  named  Annapolis  by  the  English.  This  seems  to  have 
been  a  thrifty  and  flourishing  little  plantation,  far  removed  from 
all  outside  associations,  except  the  savages  of  the  forests,  with 
whom  they  lived  in  peace.  The  first  horses  brought  to  North 
America  were  owned  and  bred  by  the  people  of  Port  Eoyal.  In 
November,  1613,  Captain  Argall,  of  Virginia,  organized  a  plun- 
dering expedition,  and  having  learned  of  the  defenseless  condi- 
tion of  Port  Royal  from  Captain  John  Smith,  he  sailed  up  there 
with  two  or  three  ships,  captured  the  place  and  carried  away 
horses,  cattle,  sheep,  wheat,  farming  utensils,  and  indeed  everv- 
thing  their  ships  would  carry,  and  then  sailed  away  to  Virginia, 
This  raid  was  without  authority  or  orders,  but  it  was  winked  at 
by  the  officials,  and  forthwith  a  second  raid  was  made  by  Argall, 
and  all  that  had  been  left  in  the  first  was  carried  away  in  the 
second,  as  well  as  some  of  the  inhabitants. 

The  pacer  of  Canada,  generally  believed  to  be  of  French  origin, 
has  long  been  an  object  of  diligent  investigation,  without  reach- 
ing any  satisfactory  results.  Again  and  again  I  have  gone  over 
the  first  half-century  of  the  history  of  the  French  plantations 
on  the  St.  Lawrence;  examining  everything  in  the  English 
language  that  held  out  any  hope  of  throwing  light  upon  the  ques- 
tion, but  nothing  was  revealed.  The  trouble  was  that  my  search 


EARLY    HORSE   HISTORY — CANADA.  143 

stopped  a  little  short  of  the  date  when  the  first  horses  arrived. 
The  management  of  the  affairs  of  the  plantations  on  the  St. 
Lawrence  being  in  a  company  located  in  France,  there  was  a 
lack  of  vigor,  not  much  growth,  and  still  less  profits  to  the  pro- 
jectors of  the  colony.  The  energies  of  the  people  seemed  to  be 
directed  almost  wholly  to  collecting  and  trading  in  peltry  in- 
stead of  building  up  a  commonwealth  from  the  productions  of 
the  soil.  For  half  a  century  these  primitive  people  lived  with- 
out horses.  Their  farms,  if  they  could  be  called  farms,  all  had  a 
frontage  on  the  water,  running  back  in  narrow  strips  to  the 
highlands.  They  did  their  plowing  with  cattle  and  their  canoes 
supplied  the  place  of  the  saddle  horse,  the  family  carriage  and 
the  lumber  wagon  to  carry  the  scanty  surplus  of  their  little  farms 
to  market.  At  last  the  company  in  France,  holding  direction 
and  control,  got  out  of  the  way,  and  the  king  of  France  assumed 
direct  authority  over  the  affairs  of  the  plantation.  On  June  30, 
1665,  the  Marquis  de  Tracy  arrived  at  Quebec,  as  viceroy,  with  a 
numerous  suite  of  retainers  and  a  regiment  of  French  soldiers. 
Two  months  later  a  large  fleet  arrived  bringing  many  colonists, 
embracing  artisans,  farmers,  peasants,  etc.,  with  their  families, 
and  a  good  number  of  horses,  the  first  that  had  ever  been  seen 
on  the  St.  Lawrence.  There  is  a  tradition  that  a  horse  had  been 
sent  over  to  the  governor  in  1642,  but  it  is  probable  he  was  lost 
on  the  voyage,  as  the  older  people  of  the  colony  had  no  recollec- 
tion or  knowledge  of  any  such  animal.  These  colonists  came 
from  the  ancient  province  of  Picardy,  not  now  to  be  found  on 
the  modern  maps  of  France,  but  it  lay  on  the  English  Channel 
in  the  extreme  northwest  of  France.  As  it  is  expressly  stated 
that  these  colonists  came  from  Picardy,  it  is  fair  to  conclude 
that  the  horses  came  from  that  portion  of  the  kingdom  also. 
At  this  period  in  history  there  had  been  no  wars  between  France 
and  England  for  many  years,  and  commercial  as  well  as  social 
intercourse  had  long  been  cultivated  between  the  people  on  both 
sides  of  the  channel.  We  know  but  little  of  the  early  horse  history 
of  France,  but  in  our  own  time  we  know  that  France  has  been 
largely  benefited  by  the  diffusion  of  the  English  blood  among 
her  horse  stock,  so  we  may  conclude  that  if  a  man  in  Kent  had  a 
horse  that  a  man  in  Picardy  wanted,  he  very  soon  got  him  in  the 
way  of  legitimate  trade.  I  think,  therefore,  it  is  safe  to  con- 
clude that  the  horse  stock  of  Northwestern  France  and  the  horse 
stock  of  England  were  very  much  the  same  in  appearance,  action 


144  THE    HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

and  blood.  On  this  basis  of  reasoning,  which  involves  no  im- 
probabilities, we  may  conclude  that  the  same  proportion  of  the 
horses  from  Picardy  were  natural  pacers. 

There  is  another  theory,  giving  the  Canadian  pacer  an  Anglo- 
American  origin,  that  commends  itself  to  the  unbiased  judgment 
with  even  greater  force  than  the  one  just  suggested.  Various 
writers  have  talked  about  the  "French  characteristics"  of  the 
Canadian  pacer,  and  all  that,  when  probably  not  one  of  them  ever 
saw  a  horse  that  he  Tcnew  to  be  French.  The  early  pacers — the 
pacing-bred  pacers — ^all  have  more  or  less  strongly  marked  resem- 
blances, especially  in  conformation,  and  it  makes  no  difference 
whether  they  come  from  Canada  or  whether  their  habitat  has 
been  south  of  Mason  and  Oixon's  line  for  two  hundred  and  fifty 
years.  When  we  look  at  a  pacer,  therefore,  we  may  as  well  be 
honest  and  say  we  don't  know  whether  he  resembles  the  horses 
that  reached  the  St.  Lawrence  in  1665,  or  those  that  reached 
Massachusetts  Bay  in  1629.  The  theory  that  the  French  Cana- 
dians got  the  foundation  of  their  pacing  stock  from  the  New 
England  colonies  rests  upon  two  well-known  facts.  First,  the 
colonies  had  a  great  abundance  of  such  horses  for  sale;  and  second, 
they  were  within  reach  of  and  purchasable  by  the  Canadians.  To 
these  two  facts  rendering  the  theory  possible,  we  have  others 
which  render  it  probable.  The  jealous  restrictions  sought  to  be 
imposed  on  both  the  English  and  French  colonists  by  the  home 
governments  of  both  people  strongly  indicate  that  there  was  no 
small  amount  of  illicit  trading,  and  this  trading,  in  the  very 
nature  of  things,  must  have  been  between  the  English  and  French. 
Toward  the  close  of  the  seventeenth  century  the  English  colo- 
nies, especially  Rhode  Island,  had  far  more  horses  than  they 
needed  for  home  use,  and  they  did  a  thriving  business  in  export- 
ing them  to  different  parts.  These  were  just  the  kind  of  horses 
the  Canadians  needed  for  their  wild  life  in  the  wilderness;  they 
were  cheaper  than  they  could  be  brought  from  France;  the 
water  way  of  Lake  Champlain  was  convenient;  pelts  and  furs 
were  a  desirable  commodity  of  exchange,  and  there  was  no  cordon 
of  customs  officers  to  keep  the  willing  traders  apart.  Of  these 
theories  we  consider  the  second  the  more  probable  of  the  two, 
and  if  we  accept  it  we  reach  the  conclusion  that  the  so-called 
* 'French"  Canadian  pacer  is  merely  a  descendant  of  the  old  Eng- 
lish pacer  brought  over  by  the  early  New  England  colonists. 
Objection  has  been  presented  to  this  theory,  on  the  grounds  that 


EARLY   HORSE   HISTORY — C  AX  A  DA.  145 

the  powerful  confederation  of  the  Six  Nations  Indians  interposed 
an  unsurmountable  barrier  to  all  trade,  whether  legitimate  or 
illicit,  between  the  Canadians  and  the  colonists  of  New  England. 
This  objection  is  certainly  conclusive  as  applied  to  the  different 
periods  of  hostilities,  but  the  hostilities  were  not  continuous. 
During  both  the  seventeenth  and  the  eighteenth  centuries  there 
ivere  periods  of  years  at  a  stretch  when  there  were  no  hostilities, 
and  when  there  was  nothing  to  prevent  the  Canadian  and  the 
Yankee  from  coming  together  and  exchanging  what  they  each 
had  that  the  other  wanted.  The  border  abounds  in  traditions  of 
the  incidents  connected  with  this  illicit  trading,  but  we  need  not 
go  to  the  border  in  the  wilderness  to  learn  that  the  desire  to 
"beat  the  customs"  is  almost  universal.  We  can  see  it  mani- 
fested every  day  at  the  docks  in  New  York,  when  a  steamer 
arrives  from  abroad.  The  fine  lady,  with  her  gloves  and  lots  of 
other  lingerie  that  she  has  been  contriving  all  the  way  across  how 
best  to  keep  from  the  sight  of  the  officer,  is  no  better  and  no 
worse  than  the  "Canuck,"  who  in  a  retired  place  at  midnight 
trades  his  peltry  to  the  Yankee  for  his  horse.  If  the  Canadian 
pacer  did  not  have  his  origin  in  New  England  it  was  not  because 
he  could  not  be  carried  across  the  border. 

When  we  enter  upon  the  consideration  of  the  actual  performers 
descended  from  the  original  Canadian  stock,  we  find  both  pacers 
and  trotters  of  speed  and  merit,  but  in  attempting  to  trace  them 
to  their  particular  ancestors  we  find  ourselves  in  a  labyrinth 
from  which  there  seems  to  be  no  deliverance.  In  the  midst  of 
this  darkness  I  am  glad  to  be  able  to  say  there  is  a  ray  of  light 
that  illumines  much  that  has  been  obscure.  The  greatest  pro- 
genitor of  trotters  and  pacers  that  Canada  has  produced,  "Old 
Tippoo,"  has  been  fully  identified  in  his  true  origin,  and  he  has 
been  well  named  "The  Messenger  of  Canada."  He  seemed  to  be 
known  all  over  Canada  as  the  greatest  of  their  trotting  and  pac- 
ing sires,  and  many  attempts  were  made  through  several  years  to 
give  his  pedigree,  but  in  all  these  attempts  there  were  elements 
of  weakness  and  in  many  of  them  very  bald  absurdities. 

When  the  roan  gelding  Tacony  made  his  record  of  2:27,  away 
back  in  1853,  the  performance  was  looked  upon  as  something  that 
would  not  be  surpassed  in  a  generation  at  least.  Then  when 
Toronto  Chief  made  his  saddle  record  of  2:24^,  ten  or  twelve 
years  later,  and  it  was  found  that  he  and  Tacony  were  both 
descended  from  a  Canadian  horse  called  Tippoo,  the  inquiry  be- 


146  THE   HOUSE   OF   AMERICA. 

came  quite  active  as  to  what  Tippoo  was,  and  all  kinds  of  imaginable 
stories  were  told  about  him.  In  the  search  for  the  history  and 
breeding  of  the  horse  Tippoo,  extending  through  more  than 
twenty  years,  many  curious  and  some  impossible  things  were 
developed,  and  as  these  old  "fads"  may  come  as  new  discoveries  in 
future  generations,  I  will  mention  two  or  three  of  them  here. 
The  first  of  these  untruthful  statements  to  assume  tangible  form 
was  to  the  eifect  that  Tippoo  was  imported  from  England,  and 
that  he  was  got  there  by  Nesthall's  Messenger.  I  never  could 
tell  how  or  where  this  story  originated,  but  it  first  appeared  in  the 
pedigree  given  to  Toronto  Chief  when  he  went  into  the  stud  on 
Long  Island.  This  was  settled  by  the  facts,  expressed  in  very 
few  words,  that  the  horse  was  not  imported,  but  bred  in  Canada, 
and  that  there  was  no  such  horse  in  England  as  "Nesthall's. 
Messenger." 

The  next  representation  came  from  an  old  horseman,  Mr.  V. 
Sheldon,  of  Canton,  New  York,  a  very  intelligent  and  careful 
correspondent,  who  had  given  much  labor  to  the  question.  He 
had  learned  from  different  sources,  that  were  satisfactory  to  his 
mind,  that  a  Mr.  Howard,  a  traveling  preacher,  had  ridden  a 
mare  from  Lowville,  New  York,  over  into  Canada;  that  this  mare 
was  in  foal  "by  a  very  noted  horse  that  stood  at  Lowville;"  that 
when  the  mare  became  too  heavy  for  his  use  under  the  saddle  he 
sold  her  to  Isaac  Morden,  and  that  the  foal  she  dropped  was  the 
famous  Tippoo.  The  name  of  the  "very  famous  horse  that  stood 
at  Lowville"  was  not  remembered,  but  as  Ogden's  Messenger 
was  there  at  that  time — 1816-17 — the  conclusion  followed  that 
he  was  the  horse.  This  representation  was  far  from  complete, 
but  as  there  was  nothing  unreasonable  about  it,  and  nothing 
known  to  be  untrue,  I  accepted  it  for  a  time,  awaiting  further  light. 

The  third  representation  came  from  Mr.  Lewis  T.  Leavens,  of 
Bloomfield,  Ontario,  who  was  born  1792,  and  was,  therefore,  old 
enough  to  have  had  some  personal  knowledge  of  the  horse.  But 
whether  his  knowledge  was  personal  or  only  traditional  cannot 
now  be  made  to  appear.  He  says  that  Tippoo  was  got  by  a  horse 
called  Escape,  and  I  will  ask  the  reader  to  note  this  name 
"Escape"  as  we  progress.  He  says  that  "when  Escape  was  on 
the  ocean,  the  vessel  encountered  a  severe  gale,  and  the  horse 
had  to  be  thrown  overboard,  and  he  was  picked  up  the  ninth  day 
off  the  coast  of  Newfoundland,  on  a  bar,  eating  rushes."  This, 
silly  and  ridiculous  story  had  been  told  and  possibly  believed  by 


EARLY    HORSE    HISTORY CANADA.  147' 

some  fools  more  than  a  hundred  years  before  the  dates  here  im- 
plied by  Mr.  Leavens.  It  is  probable  it  was  first  told  as  a  joke, 
by  some  wag  in  Rhode  Island,  when  asked  about  the  origin  of 
the  Narragansett  pacers.  He  replied  that  the  original  Narragan- 
sett  "was  caught  swimming  in  mid-ocean,  when  a  ship  came 
along,  lassoed  him,  pulled  him  on  board,  and  landed  him  safely 
in  Narragansett  Bay."  The  vitality  of  the  joke  probably  had  its 
origin  in  the  experience  of  Rip  Van  Dam,  when  in  1711  he  went 
up  to  Narragansett  for  a  flying  pacer,  which  is  related  in  another 
part  of  this  volume.  Mr.  Leavens  speaks  of  the  Rev.  Erastus  as 
the  owner  of  the  dam,  and  the  breeder  of  the  horse;  but  he  says 
the  horse  did  not  come  into  possession  of  Isaac  Morden  till  he 
was  six  or  eight  years  old.  The  date  of  his  death  is  fixed  by  Mr. 
Leavens  in  1835,  and  while  he  is  more  definite  than  our  informa- 
tion from  other  sources,  all  agree  he  died  from  a  kick  about  that 
year. 

The  next  representation  that  seems  to  be  worthy  of  noticing 
is  a  communication  that  appeared  in  the  New  York  Sportsman, 
written  by  somebody  who  signs  himself  "Dick."  Whether 
"Dick"  is  in  earnest  and  believes  what  he  writes,  or  whether  he  is 
merely  trying  to  "sell"  somebody,  we  will  leave  for  him  to  decide. 
He  seems  to  depend  upon  Mr.  Morden,  at  one  time  the  owner  of 
the  horse,  as  the  source  of  his  information.  "Dick"  says  the  sire 
of  Tippoo  was  imported  into  New  York  in  1811,  and  was  called 
Fleetwood.  Why  did  he  not  tell  us  by  whom  the  horse  Fleet- 
wood  was  imported?  If  there  was  a  man  in  New  York  in  1811  so 
big  a  fool  as  to  import  an  English  stallion  at  great  expense,  and 
then  send  him  up  to  the  wilderness  of  Canada  where  there  was 
neither  money  nor  mares,  his  name  should  be  handed  down  as  a 
historical  curiosity.  The  whole  story  is  a  "fake." 

In  January,  1883,  I  received  from  the  Hon.  J.  P.  Wiser,  of 
Prescott,  Ontario,  the  following  letter,  which  he  had  just  re- 
ceived from  the  writer: 

WELLINGTON,  December  27,  1882. 

As  the  origin  of  the  Tippoo  horses  seems  to  be  a  mystery  to  you  I  will  tell 
you.  Erastus  Howard  was  a  traveling  preacher  in  those  days,  and  he  traveled 
on  horseback.  He  bought  in  Kingston  a  dark  chestnut  mare  and  bred  her  to  a 
horse  called  "The  Scape  Goat,"  brought  from  Narragansett  Bay,  in  Rhode 
Island.  The  horse  was  a  large  brown  horse,  *nd  could  rack  (pace)  faster  than 
he  could  run.  The  colt  was  coal  black  and  large,  and  was  sold  to  Mr.  Wilcox, 
who  named  him  Tippoo  Sultan.  His  gait  was  like  the  "  Scape  "  some,  but 
soon  squared  off  to  a  trot,  and  the  way  he  could  go  was  dreadful.  In  June,. 
1836,  he  broke  his  leg  and  was  lost.  WILSON  SERLS. 


148  THE    HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

•* 

This  short  letter  was  a  great  surprise,  for  never  before  had  I 
lieard  of  Mr.  Serls.  Through  the  kindness  of  Mr.  Wiser  he  had 
entered  the  discussion,  evidently  without  knowing  anything 
about  what  representations  had  been  made  by  others,,  His  short, 
crisp  sentences  seemed  to  be  an  epitome  of  a  history  of  this  horse, 
which  he  might  be  able  to  give.  It  will  be  observed  that  the 
traveling  preacher,  Erastus  Howard,  is  still  in  the  foreground, 
and  that  Mr.  Leavens'  "Escape"  and  Mr.  Serls'  "Scape  Goat" 
are-  evidently  one  and  the  same  horse,  and  thus  these  two  men 
practically  confirm  each  other,  so  far  as  the  identity  of  the  horse 
is  concerned.  No  time  was  lost  in  preparing  a  series  of  questions 
to  be  submitted  to  Mr.  Serls,  embracing  the  sources  of  his  in- 
formation, for  although  well  advanced  in  years  he  certainly  could 
not  have  had  personal  knowledge  of  what  he  testified.  These 
questions  not  only  covered  the  minute  points  in  the  history  of 
t'he  matter,  but  they  were  so  framed  as  to  test  the  accuracy  and 
honesty  of  his  memory.  In  due  time  they  came  back  fully  and 
satisfactorily  answered,  and  as  these  answers  embrace  many  things 
that  my  readers  care  nothing  about  I  will  condense  them  into 
narrative  form. 

Mr.  Serls  derived  his  information  from  his  uncle,  Stephen 
Niles,  the  brother  of  his  mother.  In  1798  Stephen  Niles  took  a 
band  of  horses  to  Prince  Edward  County,  and  stopped  with  an 
uncle  of  his  who  was  then  a  member  of  the  provincial  parliament, 
living  on  the  Bay  of  Quinte.  His  uncle  prevailed  upon  him  to  settle 
there.  In  1800  he  was  married,  and  bought  a  farm  of  two  hun- 
dred acres  four  miles  west  of  Wellington,  where  he  lived  many 
years,  and  the  place  is  still  known  as  Mies'  Corners.  He  was  an 
orthodox  Quaker  in  his  religious  belief,  and  for  a  number  of  years 
he  was  one  of  the  bench  of  magistrates  for  Prince  Edward 
County.  When  the  War  of  1812  broke  out  he  was  employed  by 
the  British  forces  in  procuring  hay  and  grain  for  the  mounted 
troops.  In  1858  he  died,  leaving  an  honorable  name  behind  him. 

At  the  close  of  the  war  the  military  authorities  sold  off  a  large 
number  of  horses  to  the  highest  bidder,  and  Mr.  Niles  was  pres- 
ent when  the  traveling  preacher,  Erastus  Howard,  bid  off  a  dark 
chestnut  mare  for  ninety-three  dollars,  at  Kingston.  This  mare 
afterward  became  the  dam  of  the  famous  Tippoo,  and  as  a  matter 
of  course  nothing  can  ever  be  known  of  her  breeding.  In  1816  a 
man  from  Ehode  Island,  whose  name  is  not  definitely  remem- 
bered, but  believed  to  be  Williams,  traveled  the  horse  Scape  Goat 


EARLY    HORSE    HISTORY — CANADA. 

through  Prince  Edward  County,  and  he  stopped  one  day  and 
night  in  each  week  at  the  house  of  Stephen  Niles,  and  during 
that  season  Mr.  Howard  bred  his  chestnut  mare  to  this  horse, 
and,  as  already  said,  the  produce  was  Tippoo.  This  black  colt 
passed  into  the  hands  of  Mr.  Wilcox,  who  gave  him  his  name, 
and  he  afterward  passed  through  several  other  hands  before  he 
reached  Mr.  Morden  about  1826,  and  he  died  ten  years  later  from 
the  effects  of  a  kick.  As  the  horse  Scape  Goat  was  brought  from 
Narragansett  Bay,  and  as  he  was  a  remarkably  fast  pacer,  there 
can  be  no  mistake  in  calling  him  a  "Xarragansett  Pacer."  He 
was  considerably  larger  than  the  average  of  that  tribe,  but  this 
does  not  vitiate  his  title  to  a  place  in  that  family.  It  seems  he 
was  only  kept  in  Prince  Edward  County  the  one  season,  and  his 
owner,  not  being  satisfied  with  the  extent  of  his  earnings,  took 
him  back  to  Rhode  Island.  Thus,  the  horse  that  has  been 
proudly  designated  as  "Canada's  Messenger,"  was  the  son  of  a 
Xarragansett  pacer.  In  his  younger  days,  Tippoo  paced  like  his 
sire,  but  as  he  grew  older  the  trotting  gait  was  more  fully 
developed. 

It  is  safe  to  say  that  the  immediate  progeny  of  Tippoo  were 
numerous,  and  it  is  safe  to  say  that  some  of  them,  either  as  trot- 
ters or  pacers,  were  fast  for  their  day,  but  it  must  be  confessed 
that  we  know  very  little  about  the  way  they  were  bred.  One  son 
was  called  Sportsman,  but  nothing  is  known  of  his  dam  and  very 
little  of  the  horse  himself  beyond  the  fact  that  he  was  the  sire  of 
the  roan  gelding  Tacony,  that  trotted  some  great  races  about 
1853,  and  made  a  record  of  2:27.  This  horse  had  a  son  called 
Young  Sportsman,  that  was  more  widely  known  as  "the  Sager 
Horse,"  and  his  horse  became  the  sire  of  the  trotting  mare 
Clara,  or  Crazy  Jane,  as  she  was  at  one  time  called,  that  made  a 
record  of  2:27  in  1867.  Beyond  these  two  representatives  of  the 
Sportsman  line,  I  have  not  been  able  to  go.  It  has  been  claimed 
that  another  son  of  Tippoo,  called  Wild  Deer,  was  the  sire  of  the 
Sager  Horse,  but  it  does  not  seem  to  be  well  sustained.  There 
was  a  son  called  Wild  Deer,  and  several  others  that  have  been 
mentioned  by  turf  writers,  but  no  particulars  of  any  value  have 
been  given. 

Warrior,  or  Black  t  Warrior,  as  he  is  sometimes  called,  was  a 
brown  horse  and  not  a  black,  as  his  latter  name  would  imply. 
He  was  a  son  of  old  Tippoo  and  his  dam  was  a  black  mare  owned 
and  ridden  by  an  officer  in  an  English  regiment,  known  as  the 


.150  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

First  Koyals.  She  was  a  black  mare  and  after  she  was  sold  out 
of  the  service  she  was  called  "Black  Warrior/'  and  this  name 
was  transmitted  to  her  son.  This  mare  was  for  a  long  time  repre- 
sented as  the  dam  of  Royal  George,  but  she  was  the  dam  of  his 
sire.  This  horse  was  bred  at  Belleville,,  Ontario,  and  about  1840 
a  certain  Mr.  Johnston  was  moving  from  Belleville  to  Michigan. 
He  had  this  horse  with  him,  which,  becoming  lame  on  the  way, 
he  traded  to  a  Mr.  Barnes,  living  about  twenty  miles  south  of 
London,  Ontario.  He  was  a  valuable  horse  and  left  many  very 
useful  animals.  Many  of  his  get  were  pacers,,  and  he  was  kept  by 
Mr.  Barnes  till  he  died. 

Royal  George  was  a  brown-bay  horse,  foaled  about  1842,  and 
was  got  by  Warrior,  son  of  Tippoo.  His  dam  was  the  off  one  of 
-a  pair  of  bay  mares  taken  to  that  vicinity  from  Middlebury,  Ver- 
mont, by  a  Mr.  Billington.  This  mare  got  her  foot  in  a  log 
bridge  and  the  injury  made  her  a  comparative  cripple  for  life. 
Being  thus  unfitted  for  road  work,  Mr.  Billington  sold  or  traded 
her  to  Mr.  Barnes.  She  was  bred  to  Warrior  and  produced  Royal 
•George.  It  is  said  by  those  who  knew  both  animals,  that  this 
mare  was  a  better  trotter  than  Warrior,  and  from  this  springs  the 
argument  that  Royal  George  had  a  trotting  inheritance  from  his 
dam  as  well  as  from  his  sire.  To  learn  whence  this  inheritance 
came,  I  have  labored  assiduously  for  years  without  being  able  to 
technically  determine  it.  The  single  fact  that  her  sire  in  Ver- 
mont was  known  as  "the  Bristol  Horse,"  is  beyond  all  doubt,  but 
as  Mr.  Billington  was  not  living  when  this  search  was  commenced, 
it  has  not  been  possible  to  determine  just  what  horse  is  meant  by 
"Bristol  Horse."  At  one  time  Harris'  Hambletonian  was  known 
very  widely  as  "Bristol  Grey"  or  "Bristol  Horse,"  and  this  is  the 
only  horse  in  the  records  so  designated.  It  may,  therefore,  be 
assumed  as  more  than  a  probability  that  this  was  the  sire  of  the 
dam  of  Royal  George. 

When  three  or  four  years  old  he  was  sold  by  Mr.  Barnes  to 
James  Forshee,  and  he  was  known  as  "the  Forshee  Horse"  for 
several  years.  He  was  sixteen  hands  high,  not  very  handsome, 
but  well  formed,  with  plenty  of  substance  and  stamina,  good 
action,  and  a  first  class  "business"  horse  for  anything  that  was 
wanted  of  him.  In  the  stud,  at  low  prices,  he  was  largely 
patronized,  and  during  the  other  months  of  the  year  he  was  em- 
ployed in  all  kinds  of  drudgery.  From  Forshee  he  passed  to 
Frank  Hunger,  and  from  Munger  to  Mr.  Doherty,  of  St.  Gather- 


EARLY    HORSE    HISTORY — CANADA.  151 

ines,  for  four  hundred  dollars,  and  he  gave  him  the  name  of 
Royal  George,  and  kept  him  many  years.  In  1858  W.  H.  Ash- 
ford,  of  Lewiston,  Xew  York,  bought  him  and  kept  him  two  or 
three  years  there  and  at  Buffalo.  He  seems  to  have  passed  into 
Doherty's  hands  again,  and  died  at  St.  Catherine's,  December, 
1862.  It  is  not  known  that  he  ever  had  any  training  as  a  trotter 
except  what  he  got  from  his  owner  on  the  road,  and  there  is  no 
tradition  of  his  ever  having  been  in  a  race  but  once,  and  that  was 
on  the  ice  at  Hamilton,  about  1852,  against  the  famous  State  of 
Maine,  for  a  considerable  wager.  In  this  contest  he  was  the 
winner.  His  highest  rate  of  speed  was  about  2:50  under  the 
saddle.  He  was  strongly  disposed  to  pace,  but  when  he  got 
down  to  his  work  his  gait  was  a  square,  mechanical  trot.  He 
left  a  numerous  progeny  with  a  heavy  sprinkling  of  pacers  among 
them;  they  were  generally  of  fine  size  and  very  useful  animals. 
Many  of  his  sons  were  kept  entire  and  that  whole  region  of  On- 
tario was  filled  up  with  Royal  Georges,  to  say  nothing  of  the 
large  numbers  that  were  brought  across  the  border.  He  left  one 
representative  in  the  2:30  list,  and  five  sous  that  became  sires  of 
performers. 

Toronto  Chief  was  the  best  son  of  Royal  George,  according  to 
the  records.  He  was  a  brown  horse,  foaled  1850,  and  was  bred  by 
George  Larue,  of  Middlesex  County,  Ontario.  His  dam  was  a 
small  bay  mare  by  a  horse  called  Blackwood,  and  his  grandam 
was  by  Prospect.  The  horse  Blackwood  "was  bought  of  a 
Frenchman  below  Montreal  in  1837,"  and  that  is  all  that  can  be 
said  of  his  blood.  He  was  a  horse  of  fine  size  and  went  with 
great  courage.  Toronto  Chief  passed  through  several  hands  be- 
fore he  reached  his  owner,  A.  Bathgate,  of  Xew  York.  He  was  a 
horse  of  great  speed  for  his  day,  having  a  record  of  2:31  in  harness 
and  2:24^  under  saddle.  He  left  three  representatives  in  the  2:30 
list,  and  among  them  the  famous  Thomas  Jefferson,  2:23,  with 
thirty-nine  heats  to  his  credit.  Six  of  his  sons  became  sires  of 
trotters,  and  five  of  his  daughters  producers.  Like  all  the  other 
minor  families,  the  Royal  George  family  is  surely  being  absorbed 
or  submerged  in  trotting  strains  of  more  positive  and  uniform 
prepotency. 

It  is  probably  true  that  Old  Columbus  and  Old  St.  Lawrence 
were  both  descended  from  the  Tippoo  family,  as  they  were  both 
T^red  in  Canada  and  seemed  to  possess  and  transmit  the  same 
characteristics  as  the  Royal  Georges  possessed,  in  conformation 


152  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

and  gait.  Their  descendants  were  not  numerous,  but  so  many  of 
them  were  able  to  show  such  a  rate  of  speed,  either  at  the  lateral 
or  diagonal  gait,  that  they  left  a  distinct  trace  on  the  trotting 
stock  of  the  United  States.  Old  Pacing  Pilot  has  always  been 
classed  as  a  Canadian,  but  no  trace  of  his  origin  has  ever  been 
secured,  and  it  is  impossible  at  this  day  to  give  any  definite  in- 
formation as  to  whether  he  was  brought  from  Canada  or  not. 
Some  forty  or  fifty  years  ago  the  "Canadian  pacers"  were  so 
highly  esteemed  for  their  speed  that  very  many  horses  were  called 
"Canadians"  that  never  saw  Canada.  The  original  Tom  Hal  was 
purchased  in  Philadelphia  as  early  as  1838,  and  was  always  called 
a  Canadian.  He  was  the  progenitor  of  the  great  pacing  family 
still  bearing  his  name,  that  is  doubtless  the  most  noted  pacing 
family  now  in  existence.  Sam  Hazzard,  it  is  said,  was  brought 
from  Canada  about  1844,  and  left  some  noted  descendants.  Many 
others  might  be  named,  but  as  they  never  gained  great  celebrity, 
and  as  their  origin  is  not  fully  established,  I  will  leave  the 
Canadians  for  future  investigators. 

The  rich  province  of  Ontario  has  always  been,  in  all  its  ways, 
the  most  English  section  of  the  Canadian  Confederation,  and  in 
nothing  more  than  in  horsemanship.  True,  it  is  now  a  great 
trotting  region,  but  running  is  and  always  has  been  the  sport  of 
the  rich  and  fashionable,  and  almost  all  the  English  horses  im- 
ported in  Canada  have  gone  to  Western  Ontario.  On  the  other 
hand,  in  the  Maritime  Provinces — New  Brunswick,  Nova  Scotia, 
and  Prince  Edward  Island — -running  races  have  never  been 
popular,  except  at  Halifax,  which  is  a  great  military  station  and 
socially  and  otherwise  much  influenced  by  its  English  army  and 
navy  residents.  It  is  the  only  point  in  the  provinces  where  run- 
ning meetings  are  given  or  where  the  running  horse  is  at  all 
cherished.  For  generations  the  principal  sport  of  the  people  of 
these  provinces  has  been  trotting  and  pacing  races,  winter  and 
summer,  for  ice  racing  is  very  general  and  very  popular,  through 
Maritime  as  well  as  Western  Canada,  the  numbers  of  great  bays 
and  wide  rivers  affording  ample  courses,  everywhere,  throughout 
the  long  winters.  Though  there  is,  through  these  provinces,  a 
generous  sprinkling  of  horses  called  French  Canadian,  it  is  a  fact 
that  when  we  write  the  horse  history  of  Maine  we  have  written 
that  of  the  Maritime  Canadian  provinces.  The  best  of  the  early 
trotting  stock  of  these  provinces  came  from  Maine,  and  the  most 
and  the  best  of  the  old-time  trotters  of  New  Brunswick,  Nova. 


EARLY    HORSE    HISTORY — CANADA.  153 

Scotia,  and  Prince  Edward  Island  were  of  tribes  loosely  described 
as  Maine  Messengers.  For  this  there  are  ample  geographical  and 
natural  reasons.  That  part  of  Quebec  nearest  them  has  never 
been  rich  in  horses  nor  in  anything  else  which  the  Provincials 
want,  or  in  which  they  trade.  The  people  of  eastern  New  Eng- 
land are  their  natural  trading  neighbors,  and  the  city  of  St.  John, 
New  Brunswick,  especially  in  the  past,  the  common  market 
place;  and  almost  all  the  earlier  Maritime  trotting  sires  trace 
through  St.  John  to  Maine,  or  some  of  the  other  New  England 
States.  It  is  a  fact,  too,  that  for  generations  enterprising  horse- 
men, in  the  lower  provinces,  have  been  importing  American  trot- 
ting stallions  for  service,  and  to-day  the  trotting  stock  of  these 
provinces  is  very  thoroughly  Americanized.  While  the  exporta- 
tion of  horses,  principally  to  Boston  and  Bangor,  is  one  of  the  in- 
dustries of  Nova  Scotia  and  of  Prince  Edward  Island  especially, 
.almost  without  exception  trotting  and  pacing  stallions  in  use 
there  are  imported  American  horses,  or  the  descendants  of 
American  trotting  sires;  while,  as  we  have  noted,  the  foundation 
stock  came  chiefly  from  Maine,  and  in  very  small  degree  from 
Ontario  or  Quebec.  In  either  of  the  Maritime  provinces  it  is  a 
rarity  to  find  a  trotting  horse  that  has  not  more  or  less  of  Ameri- 
oan  blood. 


CHAPTER    XIII. 

ANTIQUITY   AKD   HISTORY   OF   THE    PACING   HORSE. 

The  mechanism  of  the  different  gaits — The  Elgin  Marbles — Britain  becomes  a 
Roman  province — Pacers  in  the  time  of  the  Romans — Bronze  horses  of 
Venice — Fitz  Stephen,  the  Monk  of  Canterbury — Evidence  of  the  Great 
Seals — What  Blundevillesays — What  Gervaise  Markham  says — What  the 
Duke  of  Newcastle  says — The  amble  and  the  pace  one  and  the  same — At 
the  close  of  Elizabeth's  reign — The  Galloways  and  Hobbies — Extinction  of 
the  pacer — The  original  pacer  probably  from  the  North— Polydore  Virgil's 
evidence — Samuel  Purchas'  evidence — The  process  of  wiping  out  the 
pacer — King  James  set  the  fashion — All  foreign  horses  called  "  Arabians  " 
— The  foreigners  larger  and  handsomer — Good  roads  and  wheeled  vehicles 
dispensed  with  the  pacer — Result  of  prompting  Mr.  Euren — Mr.  Youatt's 
blunder — Other  English  gentlemen  not  convinced  there  ever  vere  any 
pacers. 

IN  considering  the  antiquity  and  history  of  the  pacing  horse,  it 
seems  to  be  necessary  that  we  should  have  a  clear  perception  of 
the  mechanism  of  the  gait  from  which  he  takes  his  distinctive 
name  and  the  relation  which  that  mechanism  bears  to  other  gaits 
or  means  of  progression.  In  the  study  of  this  mechanism  we 
learn  the  combination  by  which  we  unlock  the  mystery  that  has 
puzzled  so  many  breeders  of  the  past  and.  present  generations. 
Some  have  maintained  that  the  pace  is  a  combination  of  the  trot 
and  the  gallop,  while  a  smaller  number  have  maintained  that  the 
fast  trot  was  a  combination  of  the  pace  and  the  gallop.  It  is 
quite  evident,  as  I  will  be  able  to  show,  that  neither  of  these 
parties  has  ever  given  any  careful  attention  and  study  to  the 
mechanism  of  the  different  gaits.  The  most  simple  and  least 
complicated  method  of  illustrating  this  mechanism  of  movement 
is  furnished  in  the  human  means  of  progression.  At  the  walk,  a 
man  steps  off  with  his  left  foot  and  the  heel  of  that  foot  strikes 
the  ground  before  the  toe  of  the  right  foot  leaves  it.  Then  the 
right  foot  advances  and  strikes  the  ground  before  the  toe  of  the 
left  foot  leaves  it.  This  is  the  natural  "heel  and  toe"  walk,  and 
the  speed  may  be  increased  by  quickening  the  step  and  extending 
tho  stride,  so  far  as  physical  conformation  will  permit.  Still 


ANTIQUITY    AND   HISTORY   OF  THE    PACING   HORSE.  155 

greater  speed  becomes  a  succession  of  bounds,  the  propelling  foot 
leaving  the  ground  before  the  advanced  foot  strikes  it.  This  i& 
running,  the  highest  rate  of  speed  attainable,  and  in  every  revo- 
lution, for  a  space,  the  whole  body  is  in  the  air.  In  the  action 
of  the  horse,  with  four  legs,  we  find  greater  complication,  which 
I  will  try  to  make  clear. 

First,  all  horses  walk,  all  horses  pace  or  trot,  and  all  horses 
gallop.  The  walk  is  easily  analyzed,  for  it  is  slow  and  the  move- 
ment of  each  limb  can  be  followed  by  the  eye.  Each  foot  makes 
its  own  stroke  upon  the  ground,  and  we  count  one,  two,  three, 
four  in  the  revolution. 

Second,  at  the  gallop,  which  is  a  succession  of  leaps,  each 
limb,  as  shown  by  the  instantaneous  photograph,  performs  its 
own  function,  whether  in  rising  from  the  ground,  flying  through 
the  air,  or  in  striking  the  ground  again.  There  is  harmony  in 
all,  but  there  is  no  unity  in  any  two  or  more  of  them,  and  when 
they  strike  the  ground  again  you  hear  the  impacts,  one,  two, 
three,  four,  in  a  cluster.  The  conventional  drawing  of  the  run- 
ning horse  in  action  is  impossible  in  nature,  and  a  wretched  car- 
icature of  the  action  as  it  is.  As  in  the  walk,  so  in  the  run,  we 
count  four  impacts  in  the  revolution. 

Third,  at  the  pace  the  horse  advances  the  two  feet,  on  the 
same  side,  at  the  same  time,  and  when  they  reach  the  ground 
again  there  is  but  one  impact;  then  the  two  feet  on  the  other  side 
are  advanced  and  strike  in  the  same  way.  Thus,  the  rhythm  of 
the  action  strikes  the  ear  as  that  of  the  movement  of  an  animal 
with  two  feet  instead  of  four.  In  this  there  can  be  no  mechani- 
cal mistake,  for  in  the  revolution  of  the  four-legged  pacing  horse- 
we  count  one,  two,  and  in  the  revolution  of  the  two-legged  man 
we  count  one,  two.  The  conclusion,  therefore,  seems  to  be  in- 
evitable that  the  two  legs  on  the  same  side  of  the  pacing  horse 
act  in  perfect  unison  in  performing  the  functions  of  one  leg.  At 
the  trot  the  horse  advances  the  two  diagonal  feet  at  the  same 
time,  and  when  they  reach  the  ground  again  there  is  but  one  im- 
pact; then  the  two  other  diagonal  feet  are  advanced  and  strike 
in  the  same  way.  Thus,  the  rhythm  of  the  action  strikes  the 
ear  as  that  of  the  movement  of  an  animal  with  two  feet  instead 
of  four.  In  this  there  can  be  no  mechanical  mistake,  for  in  the 
revolution  of  the  four-legged  trotting  horse  we  count  one,  two, 
and  in  the  revolution  of  the  two-legged  man  we  count  one,  two. 
The  conclusion,  therefore,  seems  to  be  inevitable  that  the  two- 


156  THE   HOUSE   OF    AMERICA. 

diagonal  legs  of  the  trotting  horse  act  in  perfect  unison  in  per- 
forming the  function  of  one  leg.  In  the  mechanism  of  the  gait 
then  that  is  midway  between  the  walk  and  the  gallop  there  is  no 
difference  in  results,  nor  distinction  in  the  economy  of  motion, 
except  that  the  pacer  uses  the  lateral  legs  as  one,  and  the  trotter 
the  diagonal  legs  as  one.  In  use,  there  is  a  vertical  distinction, 
if  that  term  should  be  allowed,  between  the  gait  of  the  pacer  and 
the  trotter.  The  action  of  the  pacer  is  lower  and  more  gliding 
which  fits  him  for  the  saddle,  while  the  action  of  the  trotter  is 
higher  and  more  bounding  which  makes  him  more  desirable  as  a 
harness  horse.  In  the  processes  of  inter-breeding  to  the  fastest, 
this  distinction,  if  it  be  a  distinction,  seems  to  be  coming  less 
real,  or  at  least  less  observable. 

While  the  essential  oneness  of  the  pace  and  the  trot  is  indi- 
€ated  above  from  the  mechanism  and  unity  of  the  two  gaits, 
there  is  a  great  mountain  of  evidence  to  be  developed  when  we 
reach  the  consideration  of  breeding  subjects,  in  which  we  will 
meet  multitudes  of  fast  trotters  getting  fast  pacers,  and  fast 
pacers  getting  fast  trotters;  fast  pacers  changed  over  to  fast  trot- 
ters and  fast  trotters  changed  over  to  fast  pacers,  and  the  final  evi- 
dence that  speed  at  the  one  gait  means  speed  at  the  other.  Hav- 
ing briefly  explained  what  a  pacer  is,  it  is  now  in  order  to  take 
up  the  question  of  whence  he  came. 

On  the  summit  of  the  Acropolis,  in  Athens,  stand  the  ruins  of 
the  Parthenon,  a  magnificent  temple  erected  to  the  goddess 
Minerva.  The  building  was  commenced  in  the  year  B.C.  437, 
and  was  completed  five  years  afterward.  All  the  statuary  was 
the  work  of  the  famous  Phidias  and  his  scholars,  made  from 
Pentelic  marble.  This  noted  building  resisted  all  the  ravages 
of  time,  and  had,  in  turn,  been  converted  into  a  Christian  temple 
and  a  Turkish  mosque.  In  1676  it  was  still  entire,  but  in  1687 
Athens  was  besieged  by  the  Venetians,  and  the  Parthenon  was 
liopelessly  wrecked.  As  a  ruin  it  became  the  prey  of  the  Turks 
and  all  other  devastators,  and  in  order  to  save  something  of  what 
remained  of  its  precious  works  of  art,  Lord  Elgin,  about  the  year 
1800,  brought  home  to  England  some  portions  of  the  frieze  of 
the  temple,  with  other  works  of  Phidias,  in  marble,  sold  them  to 
the  government,  and  they  are  preserved  in  the  British  Museum. 
This  frieze  is  a  most  interesting  subject  to  study,  not  only  as  a 
specimen  of  Greek  art  of  the  period  of  Pericles,  but  as  a  historic 
record  of  the  type  and  action  of  the  Greek  horses  of  that  day. 


ANTIQUITY  AND   HISTORY   OF   THE    PACING   HORSE.  15T 

It  consists  of  a  series  of  white  marble  slabs,  something  over  four 
feet  wide,  upon  which  are  sculptured,  in  high  relief,  the  heroes 
and  defenders  of  Athens,  mounted  on  horses,  and  some  of  these 
horses  are  pacing,  while  others  are  trotting  and  cantering.  This 
is  the  first  undoubted  record  we  have  of  the  pacer,  and  it  is  now 
over  two  thousand  three  hundred  and  thirty  years  old. 

Britain  became  a  Koman  province  in  the  reign  of  Claudius,  in 
the  first  part  of  the  first  century  of  the  Christian  era,  and  it  con- 
tinued under  the  Roman  yoke  until  A!D.  426,  when  the  troops 
were  withdrawn  to  help  Valentinian  against  the  Huns,  and  never 
returned.  When  Julius  Cassar  first  invaded  Britain,  in  the  year 
B.C.  55,  he  found  the  inhabitants  fierce  and  warlike  and  abun- 
dantly supplied  with  horses  and  war  chariots.  These  chariots 
were  driven  with  great  daring  and  skill,  and  the  fact  was  thus 
demonstrated  that  this  kind  of  warfare  was  not  a  new  thing  to 
the  Britons,  and  that  they  were  not  to  be  easily  subdued.  The 
next  year  he  returned  again,  but  the  second  seems  to  have  been 
no  more  successful  than  the  first  expedition.  But  little  is  known 
of  the  extent  of  territory  overrun  or  the  result  of  these  invasions 
beyond  the  fact  that  no  setttlement  was  made  then,  and  none  till 
about  ninety  years  afterward,  when  under  the  reign  of  Claudius, 
a  strong  military  colony  was  planted  there  and  Britain  became  a 
Roman  province.  During  these  centuries  of  bondage  we  know 
practically  nothing  of  the  lives  of  the  slaves  and  but  little  of 
their  masters,  except  the  remnants  of  military  works  for  aggression 
and  defence,  and  the  magnificent  roads  they  constructed  where- 
ever  they  moved  their  armies.  In  relation  to  their  horses,  I  will 
make  a  few  extracts  from  a  work  published  about  the  beginning  of 
this  century,  by  Mr.  John  Lawrence,  a  man  of  great  research  and  in- 
telligence, besides  of  a  wide  acquaintance  with  the  practical  affairs 
of  the  horse,  and,  I  may  add,  altogether  the  most  reliable  writer 
of  his  period.  He  says: 

"  In  forming  the  paces,  if  the  colt  was  not  naturally  of  a  proud  and  lofty 
action,  like  the  Spanish  or  Persian  horses,  wooden  rollers  and  weights  were 
i  ound  to  their  pastern  joints,  which  gave  them  the  habit  of  lifting  up  their 
feet.  This  method,  also,  was  practiced  in  teaching  them  the  ambulatura,  or 
amble  (pace),  perhaps  universally  t  e  common  traveling  pace  of  the  Romans. 

"That  natural  and  most  excellent  pace,  the  trot,  seems  to  have  been  very 
little  prized  or  attended  to  by  the  ancients,  and  was,  indeed,  by  the  Romans 
held  in  a  kind  of  contempt,  or  aversion,  as  is  demonstrated  by  the  terms  which 
served  to  describe  it.  A  trotting  horse  was  called  by  them  succussator,  o: 
shaker,  and  sometimes  cruciator,  or  tormentor,  which  bad  terms,  it  may  be  pre- 


158  THE   HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

sumed,  were  applied  specially  to  those  which  in  these  days  we  dignify  with 
the  expressive  appellation  of  '  bone-setters.'" 

The  statuary  of  the  early  ages  furnishes  some  excellent  illustra- 
tions of  the  gait  of  the  horse  at  that  period  of  the  world's  his- 
tory. The  four  bronze  horses  on  St.  Mark's  in  Venice  are  known 
throughout  the  world,  and  they  are  in  the  pacing  attitude.  The 
forefoot  that  is  advanced  is  possibly  a  little  too  much  elevated 
to  strike  the  ground  the  same  instant  the  hinder  foot  should 
strike  it,  but  the  whole  action  indicated  is  undoubtedly  the 
lateral  action.  The  date  of  these  horses  is  lost  in  history,  but  it 
is  supposed  they  were  cast  in  Rome,  about  the  beginning  of  the 
Christian  era.  Their  capture  in  Eome  and  transfer  to  Constan- 
tinople, then  their  capture  by  the  Venetians  and  transfer  to 
Venice,  next  their  capture  by  Napoleon  and  transfer  to  Paris, 
and  then  their  restoration  to  Venice,  are  all  matters  of  history. 

William  Stephanides,  or  Fitz  Stephen,  as  he  was  called,  a 
monk  of  Canterbury,  was  born  in  London,  lived  in  the  reigns  of 
King  Stephen,  Henry  II.,  and  Eichard  I.,  and  died  1191.  He 
wrote  a  description  of  London  in  Latin,  which  was  afterward 
translated  by  John  Strype,  and  printed,  from  which  I  take  the 
following  extract: 

"  There  is  without  one  of  the  gates,  immediately  in  the  suburb,  a  certain 
smooth  field  (Smithfield)  in  name  and  reality.  There  every  Friday,  unless  it 
be  one  of  the  more  solemn  festivals,  is  a  noted  show  of  well-bred  horses  ex- 
posed for  sale.  The  earls,  barons  and  knights  who  are  at  the  time  resident  in 
the  city,  as  we'l  as  most  of  the  citizens,  flock  thither  either  to  look  or  to  boy. 
It  is  pleasant  to  see  the  nags  with  their  sleek  and  shining  coats,  smoothly  ambling 
(pacing)  along,  raiting  and  setting  down,  as  it  were,  their  feet  on  either  side;  in 
one  part  (of  the  field)  are  horses  better  adapted  to  the  esquires;  those  whose  pace, 
is  rougher,  yet  expeditious,  lift  up  and  set  down,  as  it  were,  the  two  oppo.ice  fore 
find  hind  feet  (trotting)  together." 

After  locating  and  describing  the  pacers  in  one  part  of  the  field 
and  the  trotters  in  another,  Fitz  Stephen  goes  on  to  take  a  look 
at  the  colts,  then  horses  of  burden,  "strong  and  stout  of  limb/' 
and  then  their  chargers  in  their  galloping  action.  He  next  gives 
a  very  spirited  description  of  the  race,  when  the  people  raise  a 
shout  and  all  the  other  horses,  cattle,  etc.,  are  cleared  away,  that 
the  contestants  may  have  an  unobstructed  field.  It  is  a  fact 
worthy  of  note  that  every  English  writer  on  the  race  horse,  for 
the  past  century  or  two,  has  quoted  a  part  of  the  above  paragraph 
from  Fitz  Stephen  as  the  first  known  and  recorded  instance  of 


ANTIQUITY   AND   HISTORY   OF  THE   PACING   HORSE.  159 

racing  in  England,  but  left  one  of  the  most  important  parts  out. 
Even  Mr.  Whyte,  one  of  the  most  prominent  of  modern  writers, 
in  his  "History  of  the  British  Turf,"  seems  to  have  followed  some 
other  writer,  in  the  omission;  or  possibly,  as  he  never  had  seen  a 
pacer  in  England,  he  concluded  that  Fitz  Stephen  had  only  imag- 
ined that  he  saw,  in  one  part  of  the  field,  horses  moving  at  the 
lateral  gait.  In  the  paragraph  quoted  above,  I  have  italicised 
that  part  of  the  description  which  English  writers  on  turf  sub- 
jects have  omitted  with  remarkable  uniformity. 

This  seems  to  have  been  the  period  in  which  the  pacing  horse 
reached  the  highest  point  in  official  and  popular  appreciation,  at 
least  since  the  days  of  the  Roman  occupation  of  Britain.  In 
speaking  of  this  period,  Mr.  Lawrence  says:  "All  descriptions  of 
saddle  horses  were  taught  to  amble"  (that  did  not  amble  natu- 
rally), "and  that  most  excellent  and  useful  gait,  the  trot,  was 
almost  entirely  disused."  In  addition  to  the  evidence  of  Fitz 
Stephen,  we  have  that  furnished  by  the  Great  Seals  of  a  succes- 
sion of  sovereigns  commencing  with  Richard  L,  and  continuing 
to  Elizabeth.  These  seals  represent  a  knight  in  armor,  mounted 
on  a  pacing  horse  in  action,  and  perhaps  the  most  conspicuous, 
at  least  the  clearest,  impression  that  has  come  down  to  us  is  that 
of  King  John,  used  at  Runnymede,  when  he  yielded  to  the  de- 
mands of  his  barons  and  granted  the  Magna  Charta.  This  act 
secured  the  liberties  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  race  for  all  time  and  in 
all  climes. 

Mr.  Thomas  Blundeville  was,  probably,  the  first  writer  on  the 
horse  who  undertook  to  publish  a  book  in  the  English  language 
on  that  subject.  This  book,  entitled  "The  Art  of  Riding,"  was 
merely  a  translation  from  the  Italian,  with  some  brief  observa- 
tions on  English  horses  added  to  it.  The  first  edition,  it  is  said, 
was  published  hi  London,  1558,  the  year  that  Queen  Elizabeth  as- 
cended the  throne.  The  only  edition  which  I  have  been  able  to 
find  in  the  British  Museum  is  that  of  1580,  in  old  English  black 
letter.  In  quoting  from  the  old  authors  of  that  period  I  will 
seek  to  avoid  confusion  by  using  the  modern  orthography.  In 
speaking  of  the  horses  of  his  day  he  says: 

"  Some  men  would  have  a  breed  of  great  trotting  horses  meet  for  the  war 
and  to  serve  in  the  field.  Some  others  again  would  have  a  breed  of  ambling 
horses  of  a  mean  stature  for  to  journey  and  travel  by  the  way.  Some,  again, 
would  have  a  race  of  swift  runners  to  run  for  wagers  or  to  gallop  the  buck,  or 
to  serve  for  such  like  exercise  for  pleasure.  But  the  plain  countryman  would 
have  a  breed  only  for  draft  or  burthen. 


160  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

"  The  Irish  Hobble  is  a  pretty  fine  horse,  having  a  good  head  and  a  body  in- 
differently well  proportioned,  saving  that  many  of  them  be  slender  and  pin-- 
buttocked.  They  are  tender-mouthed,  nimble,  pleasant  and  apt  to  be  taught, 
and  for  the  most  part  they  be  amblers  and  thus  very  meet  for  the  saddle  and  to 
travel  by  the  way.  Yea,  and  the  Irishmen,  both  with  darts  and  light  speare, 
do  use  to  skirmish  with  them  in  the  field,  and  many  of  them  do  prove  to  that 
use  very  well,  by  means  they  be  so  light  and  swift. 

"  Let  those  mares  that  shall  be  put  to  the  stallion  be  of  a  high  stature, 
strongly  made,  large  and  fair,  and  have  a  trotting  pace  as  the  mares  of  Flan- 
ders and  some  of  our  own  mares  be.  For  it  is  not  meet,  for  divers  reasons, 
that  horses  of  [service  stallions]  should  amble.  But  if  any  man  seeks  to  have- 
a  race  of  ambling  horses,  to  travel  by  the  way,  then  I  would  wish  his  stallion 
to  be  a  fair  jennet  of  Spain,  or  at  least  a  bastard  jennet,  or  else  a  fair  Irish 
ambling  Hobbie;  and  the  mare  to  be  also  a  bastard  jennet,  bred  here  within 
this  realm,  having  an  ambling  pace,  or  else  some  other  of  our  ambling  mares, 
so  that  the  mare  be  well  proportioned.  And  if  any  man  desires  to  have  swift 
runners  let  him  choose  a  horse  of  Barbary  or  a  Turk  to  be  his  stallion,  and  let 
the  mare,  which  shall  be  put  unto  him,  be  like  of  stature  and  making  unto 
him,  so  nigh  as  may  be,  for  most  commonly,  such  sire  and  dam  such  colt." 

It  is  evident  Mr.  Blundeville  was  not  much  of  a,  friend  of  the 
pacer,  but  as  an  honest  writer  he  considers  things  as  he  finds 
them.  Unfortunately  he  throws  no  light  upon  just  what  he 
means  by  the  term  "Spanish  Jennet,"  and  a  definition  of  that 
term,  as  used  in  the  sixteenth  century,  would  throw  much  light 
on  passages  from  following  writers  in  later  periods.  Everybody 
knows  he  was  a  small  Spanish  saddle  horse,  but  nobody  knows 
just  what  gait  he  took.  To  use  Blundevilles  own  language, 
"The  pace  of  the  jennet  of  Spain  is  neither  trot  nor  amble,  but  a, 
comely  kind  of  going  like  the  Turke." 

Mr.  Gervaise  Markham  published  several  revised  and  enlarged 
editions  of  his  work  on  the  horse,  the  last  of  which  I  have  been 
able  to  examine  being  printed  in  London,  1607,  the  same  year 
the  colony  was  planted  at  Jamestown,  Virginia.  In  this  edition 
he  devotes  nine  short  chapters  or  paragraphs  to  the  pacer.  In 
quoting  from  him  I  will  again  use  the  modern  methods  of  spell- 
ing. He  says: 

"  First  to  speak  of  ambling  in  general.  It  is  that  smooth  and  easy  pace 
which  the  labor  and  industry  of  an  ingenious  brain  hath  found  out  to  relieve 
the  aged,  sick,  impotent  and  diseased  persons,  to  make  women  undertake 
journeying  and  so  by  their  community  to  grace  society;  to  make  great  men  try 
the  ease  of  travel,  more  willing  to  thrust  themselves  into  the  offices  of  the  com- 
monwealth, and  to  do  the  poor  both  relief  and  service.  It  makes  them  when- 
necessity,  or  as  the  proverb  is,  "when  the  devil  drives,"  not  to  be  vexed  witto 
the  two  torments,  a  troubled  mind  and  a  tormented  body.  To  conclude,  am- 


ANTIQUITY   AND   HISTORY   OF  THE   PACING   HORSE.  101 

bling  was  found  out  for  the  general  ease  of  the  whole  world,  as  long  as  there  is 
either  pleasure,  commerce  or  trade  amongst  the  people.  Now  for  the  manner 
of  the  motion  and  the  difference  betwixt  it  and  trotting.  It  cannot  be  described 
more  plainly  than  I  have  set  down  in  my  former  treatise;  which  is  that  it  is  the 
taking  up  of  both  legs  together  upon  one  side  and  so  carrying  them  smoothly 
along  to  set  them  down  upon  the  ground  even  together,  and  in  that  motion  he 
must  lift  and  wind  up  his  fore  foot  somewhat  high  from  the  ground,  but  his 
hinder  foot  he  must  no  more  than  take  from  the  ground,  as  it  were,  sweep  it 
close  to  the  earth.  Now,  by  taking  up  both  his  legs  together  on  one  side,  I 
mean  he  must  take  up  his  right  fore  foot  and  his  right  hinder  foot.  For,  as  in 
the  contrary  pace,  when  a  horse  trots  he  takes  up  his  feet  crosswise,  as  the 
left  hinder  foot  and  the  right  fore  foot,  etc." 

Mr.  Markham,  in  his  edition  of  1607,  then  goes  on  in  six  or 
eight  chapters  acknowledging  that  many  foals  pace  naturally, 
and  to  show  how  the  foal  may  be  trained  to  pace.  His  methods 
are  very  cruel,  in  many  cases,  and  very  crude  throughout;  but  it 
clearly  demonstrates  the  fact  that  in  the  sixteenth  century  the 
pace  was  a  very  general  gait  among  English  horses.  In  these 
chapters  we  find  the  toe  weight  first  introduced  as  well  as  the 
trammels  or  hopples.  The  most  striking  fact  brought  out  in 
these  chapters  is  the  discovery  that  more  than  three  hundred 
years  ago  Englishmen  were  using  the  same  devices  to  convert 
trotters  into  pacers  that  we  are  now  using  to  convert  pacers  into 
trotters.  He  takes  notice  that  Mr.  Blundeville  had  advised  those 
who  wished  to  breed  amblers  to  select  a  Spanish  jennet  or  an 
Irish  Hobbie,  and  objects  to  the  former  on  the  grounds  that  their 
paces  are  weak  and  uncertain.  From  this  I  conclude  that  the 
gait  of  the  jennet,  whatever  it  might  have  been,  was  not  a  habit 
of  action  fixed  in  the  breed,  and  that  its  transmission  was  doubt- 
ful. 

Mr.  Markham  then  goes  on  further  to  explain  the  mechanism 
of  the  trot  and  the  pace  and  incidentally  introduces  the  rack  or 
single-foot  action,  which,  I  think,  is  the  first  time  I  have  found 
it  in  any  English  writer.  He  says: 

"  The  nearer  a  horse  taketh  his  limbs  from  the  ground,  the  opener  and  evener 
and  the  shorter  he  treadeth,  the  better  will  be  his  pace,  and  the  contrary 
declares  much  imperfection.  If  you  buy  a  horse  for  pleasure  the  amble  is  the 
best,  in  which  you  observe  that  he  moves  both  his  legs  on  one  side  togethe- 
neat  with  complete  deliberation,  for  if  he  treads  too  short  he  is  apt  to  stumble, 
if  too  large  to  cut  and  if  shuffling  or  rowling  he  does  it  slovenly,  and  besides 
rids  no  ground.  If  your  horse  be  designed  for  hunting,  a  racking  pace  is  most 
expedient,  which  little  differs  from  the  amble,  only  is  more  active  and  nimble, 
whereby  the  horse  observes  due  motion,  but  you  must  not  force  him  too  eagerly, 


162  THE    HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

lest  being1  in  confusion  be  lose  all  knowledge  of  what  you  design  him  to,  and 
so  handle  his  legs  confusedly.  The  gallop  is  requisite  for  race  horses.  .  .  . 
If  he  gallop  round  and  raise  his  fore  legs  he  is  then  said  to  gallop  strongly,  but 
not  capable  of  much  speed,  and  is  fitter  for  the  war  than  racing." 

In  1667  the  Duke  of  Newcastle  published  his  famous  work  on 
the  horse  under  the  title,  "A  New  Method  and  Extraordinary 
Invention  to  Dress  Horses,  and  Work  them  According  to  Nature 
and  also  To  Perfect  Nature  by  the  Subtilty  of  Art  which  was 
Never  Found  Out,  but  by  the  Thrice  Noble,  High,  and  Puissant 
Prince,  William  Cavendish,  Duke,  Marquess,  and  Earl  of  New- 
castle, etc.,  etc./'  followed  with  twelve  other  titles  and  offices. 
The  book  was  dedicated  to  "His  Most  Sacred  Majesty,  Charles 
the  Second/'  and  is  pretentious  and  magniloquent  in  its  letter 
press  and  its  make-up  as  it  is  in  its  title.  In  this  work  there  is 
a  great  deal  of  bad  English,  some  sense,  and  much  nonsense,  all 
mixed  up  with  a  strut  of  superiority  that  His  Grace,  no  doubt, 
felt  justified  in  enjoying  after  his  long  years  of  beggary  in  Ant- 
werp. In  giving  the  natural  gaits  of  the  horse  he  places  the 
walk  first,  then  the  trot  and  next  the  amble,  which  he  describes 
very  minutely  as  follows: 

"  For  an  amble  he  removes  both  his  legs  of  a  side,  as,  for  example,  take  the 
far  side,  he  removes  his  fore  leg  and  his  hinder  leg  at  one  time,  whilst  the 
other  two  legs  of  the  near  side  stand  still;  and  when  those  legs  are  on  the 
ground,  which  he  first  removed,  at  the  same  time  they  are  upon  the  ground 
the  other  side,  which  is  the  nearer  side,  removes  fore  leg  and  hinder  leg  on 
that  side,  and  the  other  legs  of  the  far  side  stand  still.  Thus  an  amble  removes 
both  his  legs  of  a  side  and  every  remove  changes  sides;  two  of  a  side  in  the 
air  and  two  upon  the  ground  at  the  same  time.  And  this  is  a  perfect  amble." 

The  duke  seems  to  have  been  somewhat  profuse  in  the  use  of 
words,  and  not  very  happy  in  his  use  of  them,  but  after  all  we 
know  just  what  he  means.  The  description  of  the  movement  is 
that  of  the  clean-cut  pace,  and  our  object  in  introducing  it  here 
is  not  only  to  show  that  the  pace  was  then  a  well-known  and 
natural  gait  in  England,  but  also  to  show  that  the  pace  and  the 
amUe  are  one.  In  itself,  the  word  "amble"  is  a  better  word  than 
"pace,"  for  the  latter  is  often  used  in  referring  to  a  rate  of  speed 
without  regard  to  the  particular  gait  taken  by  the  horse,  but  in 
this  country  it  is  now  universally  understood  to  apply  to  the 
lateral  motion,  and  it  would  not  be  wise  at  this  day  to  attempt  to 
change  it.  There  is  an  undefined  supposition  in  the  mind  oi 
some  people  that  the  amble  is  something  different  from  the  pace, 


ANTIQUITY   AND   HISTORY   OF   THE   PACING   HORSE.  163 

that  it  is  a  slower  and  less  pronounced  gait,  and  hence  we  are 
often  told  a  given  horse  did  not  pace,  but  "he  ambled  off."  In 
all  that  we  have  found  in  the  writings  of  the  past,  and  in  all  that 
I  have  seen  with  my  own  eyes,  I  have  not  been  able  to  discover 
that  there  is  any  distinction  between  the  amble  and  the  pace. 
The  only  distinction  is  not  in  the  gait  itself,  but  in  the  fact  that 
our  ancestors,  four  hundred  years  ago,  used  the  word  "amble" 
to  express  precisely  the  same  thing  that  their  descendants  now 
express  by  the  word  "pace."  The  only  sense  in  which  the  word 
"amble"  is  used  among,  the  horsemen  of  this  country  is  to  de- 
scribe a  kind  of  slow,  incipient  pace  that  many  horses,  both  run- 
ners and  trotters,  show  when  recalled  for  a  fresh  start  in  scoring 
for  a  race.  This  probably  indicates,  whether  in  the  case  of  a 
runner  or  a  trotter,  that  somewhere,  not  very  far  removed,  there 
is  a  pacing  inheritance,  and  this  incipient  amble,  as  it  is  some- 
times called,  comes  from  that  inheritance.  It  is  also  possible 
that  it  may  arise  from  the  excitement  of  the  start  and  the  confu- 
sion consequent  upon  the  contest. 

At  the  close  of  Queen  Elizabeth's  reign,  about  the  beginning 
of  the  seventeenth  century,  the  pacing  horse  of  England  was  at 
the  highest  point  of  his  utility  and  fame.  He  was  the  horse  for 
the  race  course,  he  was  the  horse  for  the  hunting  field,  and  he  was 
the  horse  for  the  saddle.  He  was  able  to  beat  King  James' 
Arabian,  and  with  the  few  Barbs  that  had  then  been  brought  in, 
the  historian  informs  us,  he  was  able  to  hold  his  own.  There 
were  two  tribes  of  his  congeners,  the  Galloway  and  the  Irish 
Hobbie,  the  former  from  Southwestern  Scotland  and  the  north  of 
England,  and  the  latter  from  Ireland.  These  tribes  were  chiefly 
pacers,  and  not  a  few  of  them  were  distinguished  as  running 
horses.  The  Bald  Galloway,  as  he  was  called,  was  a  grand  repre- 
sentative of  his  tribe.  He  was  simply  a  native  pony  with  a  bald 
face,  and  he  was  a  capital  runner  for  his  day,  and  a  number  of 
his  get  were  distinguished  runners.  True,  he  is  tricked  out  in 
the  Stud  Book  with  a  pedigree,  wholly  fictitious,  and  that  no- 
body ever  heard  of  for  a  hundred  years  after  he  was  foaled,  but 
that  did  not  prevent  his  daughter  Roxana,  when  bred  to  Godol- 
phin  Arabian,  from  producing  two  of  his  greatest  sons,  Lath  and 
Cade.  This  topic,  however,  has  already  been  considered  in  the 
chapter  on  the  English  Race  Horse.  The  Galloways  were  very 
famous  as  pacers  in  their  day,  and  it  seems  they  were  about  the 
last  remnants  of  the  pacing  tribes  to  be  found  in  England.  It 


164  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

seems,  also,  that  long  after  they  had  ceased  to  be  known  on  the 
other  side  their  descendants  were  still  known  by  the  same  desig- 
nation in  Virginia.  From  the  history  of  the  times,  it  appears 
that  a  wealthy  Irish  gentleman  invested  quite  largely  in  shipping 
live  stock  to  Virginia,  and  there  can  hardly  be  a  doubt  that  his 
shipments  included  some  of  the  Irish  Hobbies. 

While  the  opening  of  the  seventeenth  century  witnessed  the 
supremacy  of  the  English  pacer,  in  the  uses  and  enjoyments  of 
the  lives  of  the  people,  during  the  whole  course  of  its  succeeding 
years  he  was  battling  for  his  existence,  and  at  its  close  he  was 
nearly  extinct.  At  the  close  of  Queen  Anne's  reign  there  were 
still  a  few  Galloways  left,  but  in  the  early  Georges  there  were  no 
longer  any  survivors,  and  Great  Britain  was  without  a  pacer  in 
the  whole  realm.  The  extinction  of  a  race  of  horses  that  had 
been  the  delight  of  the  kings,  queens,  nobility,  and  gentry  of  a 
great  nation  for  many  centuries  is,  perhaps,  without  a  precedent 
in  the  history  of  any  civilized  people,  and  the  causes  which  pro- 
duced this  wonderful  result  are  well  worthy  of  careful  study.  In 
looking  into  these  causes  we  must  consider  the  facts  as  we  find 
them. 

As  we  have  no  guide,  either  historic,  linguistic  or  ethnographic,, 
by  which  we  can  certainly  determine  the  blood  of  the  original 
inhabitants  of  the  British  Isles,  it  is  not  remarkable  that  we 
should  be  in  profound  ignorance  as  to  the  blood  of  their  horses. 
They  were,  doubtless,  like  their  masters,  of  mixed  origin,  and 
through  all  the  centuries  their  appearance  would  indicate  that 
they  have  been  bred  and  reared  in  a  nomadic  or  semi-wild  state, 
in  which  only  the  toughest  and  fleetest  had  survived.  A  good 
many  years  ago  I  met  with  a  theory,  advanced  by  somebody,  that 
the  original  horse  stock  of  Britain  came  from  the  North,  but 
there  were -no  reasons  given  to  support  it.  I  have  no  hesitation 
in  accepting  this  theory,  as  far  as  it  distinguishes  between  the 
North  and  the  South,  for  some  Northern  countries  produce  vast 
numbers  of  natural  pacers,  as  Eussia,  for  instance,  but  I  have 
never  learned  that  any  Southern  country  produced  pacers.  Cer- 
tainly the  shaft  horse  of  the  Eussian  drosky  has  been  a  flying 
pacer  for  generations,  and  great  numbers  of  them  are  produced 
in  Eussia,  especially  in  the  eastern  part  of  the  empire.  As  these 
pacers  are  produced  in  a  natural  and  semi-wild  state,  it  must  be 
conceded  that  habits  of  action  have  been  inherited  from  their 
ancestors  in  the  remote  past.  Historically,  we  know  that  the 


ANTIQUITY   AND   HISTORY   OF   THE   PACING   HORSE.  165 

Phoenicians,  when  they  ruled  the  trade  of  the  world,  supplied  the 
whole  of  the  northern  coast  of  Africa,  from  Egypt  to  Algiers,  and 
the  southern  coast  of  Spain,  with  horses,  about  a  thousand  years 
before  the  Christian  era.  Now,  the  horses  of  those  regions  are 
the  descendants  of  the  original  stock  carried  there  by  the  Phoeni- 
cians, and  we  know  their  habit  of  action  is  not  that  of  the  pacer. 
Hence  the  conclusion  that  the  English  pacer  came  from  the 
North  and  not  from  the  South.  In  speaking  of  the  difference  in 
the  gaits  of  Northern  and  Southern  horses,  Mr.  John  Lawrence 
specifies  the  horses  of  Norway,  Sweden,  Denmark,  etc.,  and  says: 
"They  are  round  made,  but  with  clean  heads  and  limbs;  their 
best  pace  is  the  trot  (or  pace),  which  indeed  is  the  characteristic 
pace  of  the  Northern,  as  the  gallop  is  of  the  Southern  horse." 
Other  writers  speak  of  the  trot  (or  pace)  as  common  to  Northern 
horses,  but  as  not  common  to  Southern  horses.  Now,  as  all 
Southern  horses  do  trot,  and  as  these  writers  could  not  fail  to 
know  that  they  trotted,  at  some  rate  of  speed,  we  must  construe 
their  terms  so  as  to  be  consistent  with  plain,  common  sense. 
There  was  something  in  the  "trot"  of  the  Northern  horse  alto- 
gether different  from  the  "trot"  of  the  Southern  horse  that  ren- 
dered his  habit  of  action  more  conspicuous,  probably  by  his  higher 
rate  of  speed,  but  still  more  probably  by  the  peculiar  mechanism 
of  his  lateral  action.  If  we  insert  the  word  "pace"  instead  of 
the  word  "trot,"  the  meaning  of  these  old  writers  becomes  very 
plain  and  in  harmony  with  other  known-  facts.  Neither  does  it 
militate  against  the  theory  that  the  inhabitants  of  Britain  may  have 
secured  their  original  horse  stock  from  the  Phoenician  merchants; 
but  if  they  did,  it  seems  quite  evident  that  at  a  later  date  they 
supplemented  their  supply  from  the  pacing  element  from  the 
North. 

At  the  close  of  the  fifteenth  century  Polydore  Virgil,  an 
Italian  ecclesiastic,  came  to  England  and  wrote  a  descriptive  his- 
tory of  the  British  Islands  in  Latin,  which  was  published  about 
1509.  Part  of  this  history  was  very  clumsily  translated  about 
the  time  the  English  language  began  to  assume  its  present  form 
in  literature  and  learning.  In  speaking  of  the  horses  of  the 
country,  he  seems  to  have  been  greatly  surprised  with  the  pacers, 
and  treats  them  as  a  curiosity.  He  says:  "A  great  company  of 
their  horses  do  not  trot,  but  amble,  and  yet  neither  trotters  nor 
amblers  are  strongest,  as  strength  is  not  always  incident  to  that 
which  is  most  gentle  or  less  courageous."  It  will  be  observed 


166  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

that  these  observations  were  made  nearly  four  hundred  years  ago, 
and  that  i:he  surprise  of  the  Italian  was  not  at  merely  seeing  a 
few  pacers  which  he  had  never  seen  in  his  own  country,  but  that 
"the  great  company"  of  English  horses  were  pacers.  As  I  have 
here  given  an  instance  showing  the  surprise  of  an  Italian  at  find- 
ing pacers,  I  will  follow  it  with  another  showing  the  surprise  of 
an  Englishman  at  not  finding  any  pacers.  The  chaplain  of  the- 
Earl  of  Cumberland,  on  his  several  voyages  of  discovery  in  South 
America  and  the  West  India  Islands,  about  1596,  made  elaborate 
note  of  what  he  saw  and  learned  of  the  new  countries  which  the 
English  then  visited  for  the  first  time.  These  notes  passed  into  the 
hands  of  that  wonderfully  prolific  writer,  or  rather  compiler, 
Samuel  Purchas,  from  whose  fourth  volume,  page  1171,  the  fol- 
lowing paragraph  is  taken: 

"  And  I  wot  not  bow  that  kind  of  beast  [speaking  of  cattle]  bath  specially 
a  liking  to  tbese  Southerly  parts  of  the  world  above  their  horses,  none  of  which 
I  have  seen  by  much  so  tall  and  goodly  as  ordinarily  they  are  in  England;  they 
were  well  made  and  well  mettled,  and  good  store  there  are  of  them,  but  me- 
thinks  there  are  many  things  wanting  in  them  which  are  ordinary  in  our  Eng- 
lish light  horses.  They  are  all  trotters,  nor  do  I  remember  that  I  have  seen 
above  one  ambler,  and  that  was  a  little  riddling  nag.  But  it  may  be  if  there 
were  better  breeders  they  would  have  better  and  more  useful  increase,  yet  they 
are  good  enough  for  hackneys,  to  which  use  only  almost  they  are  employed." 

The  surprise  of  the  Englishman  at  finding  no  pacers  in  South 
America  seems  to  have  been  as  great  as  that  of  the  Italian  at 
finding  so  many  of  them  in  England,  one  hundred  years  earlier. 
These  horses  were  strictly  Spanish,  and  probably  were  descended 
from  those  brought  from  Palos  in  1493  by  Columbus,  the  first 
horses  that  ever  crossed  the  Atlantic.  The  ''one  little  fiddling 
nag"  that  showed  some  kind  of  a  pacing  gait  may  have  been  of 
English  blood  and  captured  from  some  English  expedition,  sev- 
eral of  which  were  unfortunate;  or  his  failure  to  trot  may  have 
been  the  result  of  an  injury.  It  should  not  be  forgotten  that  in 
that  period  every  sea  captain  was  out  for  what  he  could  capture, 
and  this  was  especially  the  case  as  between  the  English  and  the 
Spanish.  These  are  the  outlines  of  the  principal  points  of  evi- 
dence that  the  pacing  habit  of  action  came  from  the  North  and 
riot  from  the  South.  That  there  were  pacers  in  both  Greece  and 
Rome  before  the  Christian  era,  and  perhaps  later,  there  can  be  no- 
doubt,  for  they  were  both  overrun  and  devastated  again  and 
again  by  the  hordes  of  Northern  Barbarians,  bringing  their  flocks-, 


ANTIQUITY   AND   HISTORY   OF   THE    PACING   HORSE.  167 

and  their  herds  and  their  families,  as  well  as  their  horses,  with 
them. 

This  question  naturally  suggests  itself  here:  "If  the  English 
pacer  had  been  the  popular  favorite  of  the  English  people  for  so 
many  centuries,  how  did  it  come  that  he  and  his  habit  of  action 
had  been  so  completely  wiped  out  in  one  century,  the  seven- 
teenth?" This  question  might  be  answered  in  very  few  words, 
by  saying  the  people  thought  they  were  getting  something  bet- 
ter to  put  in  his  place.  In  reaching  this  conclusion  I  will  not 
pretend  to  say  the  judgment  of  the  people  was  not  right,  that  is, 
if  they  exercised  any  judgment  in  the  case.  "Jamie  the  Scots- 
man" when  on  the  throne  set  the  fashion  in  the  direction  of 
foreign  blood  by  paying  the  enormous  price  of  five  hundred 
pounds  for  the  Markham  Arabian.  The  Duke  of  Newcastle, 
when  he  was  young,  had  personally  seen  this  horse,  and  while  he 
thought  he  was  a  true  Arabian,  he  described  him  as  a  very  ordi- 
nary horse  in  his  size  and  form,  and  an  entire  failure  as  a  race 
horse.  It  seems  that  any  average  native  pacer  could  outrun  him, 
but  he  carried  the  badge  of  royalty,  and  that  was  sufficient  to 
make  him  fashionable,  as  he  was  not  only  the  king's  horse,  but 
was  himself  a  royal  Arabian.  The  weak  place  in  the  character 
of  James  L,  in  addition  to  his  intolerable  pedantry,  was  his  in- 
ordinate ambition  to  be  considered  the  wisest  sovereign  who  ever 
sat  upon  a  throne  since  the  days  of  Solomon.  His  courtiers, 
nobility,  and  all  who  approached  him  understood  his  weakness, 
and  a  little  quiet  praise  of  the  great  superiority  of  the  Arabian 
blood  in  the  horse,  over  all  other  breeds  and  varieties,  was  always 
grateful  to  the  monarch,  for  he  was  the  original  discoverer  and 
patentee  of  that  blood.  Then  and  there,  in  order  to  praise  the 
wisdom  of  a  foolish  king,  a  foolish  fashion  grew  into  a  foolish 
notion  that  has  afflicted  all  England  from  that  day  to  this.  No 
humbug  of  either  ancient  or  modern  times  has  had  so  long  a  run 
and  so  wide  a  range  as  the  miserable  fallacy  "that  all  excellence 
in  the  horse  comes  from  the  Arabian."  Notwithstanding  the 
thousand  tests  that  have  been  made  and  the  thousand  failures 
that  have  invariably  followed,  from  the  time  of  King  James  to 
the  present  day,  there  are  still  men  writing  books  and  magazine 
articles  on  the  assumption  that  "all  excellence  in  the  horse  comes 
from  the  Arabian,"  without  ever  having  devoted  an  honest  hour 
to  the  study  of  the  question  as  to  whether  this  is  a  truth  or  a  fal- 
lacy. This  craze  for  Arabian  blood  was  the  primary  cause  of  the 


168  THE   HOUSE   OF  AMEBICA. 

extinction  of  the  pacer,  and  this  craze  was  so  strong  in  its  in- 
fluence that  when  a  foreign  horse  was  brought  in,  no  difference 
from  what  country,  if  he  were  of  the  lighter  type  he  was  called 
an  Arabian  and  so  advertised  in  order  to  secure  the  patronage  of 
breeders.  Horses  brought  from  the  African  coast  were  invaria- 
bly classed  as  Arabians,  notwithstanding  they  and  their  ancestors 
were  in  Africa  more  than  a  thousand  years  before  there  were  any 
horses  in  Arabia;  and  the  same  may  be  said  of  Spain.  But  as  this 
line  of  inquiry  has  already  been  considered  in  another  chapter, 
I  will  get  back  to  the  immediate  topic. 

The  process  of  breeding  out  the  pacer  did  not  commence  in 
real  earnest  until  the  middle  of  the  seventeenth  century,  when 
the  Stuarts  regained  the  sovereignty  of  Great  Britain  in  the  per- 
son of  Charles  II.  Released  from  the  restraints  of  Puritan  rule, 
the  Restoration  brought  with  it  a  carnival  of  immorality  and  vice, 
for  the  court  and  the  courtiers  set  the  fashion  and  the  people  fol- 
lowed. As  the  breeding  interest  of  the  period  of  which  we  now 
speak  has  already  been  considered  in  the  chapter  on  the  English 
Race  Horse,  I  will  not  further  enlarge  upon  it.  The  light,  or 
running  and  hunting,  horses  of  England  of  that  day  were  not  all 
pacers,  but  they  were  all  of  the  same  type  and  the  same  blood, 
hence  when  I  speak  of  the  pacers  I  include  their  congeners. 
They  were  small — less  than  fourteen  hands  high — and  not  gener- 
ally handsome  and  attractive.  In  general  utility  they  were  ahead 
of  the  importations,  and  doubtless  many  of  them  could  run  as 
fast  and  as  far  as  the  foreign  horses,  but  the  foreigners  had  the 
advantage  in  size,  especially  the  Turks  and  the  Neapolitans;  be- 
sides this,  they  were  more  uniformly  handsome  and  attractive  in 
their  form  and  carriage.  It  is  also  probable  that  the  outcross 
from  the  strangers  to  invigorate  the  stock  was  needed  and  re- 
sulted in  the  increase  of  the  size  of  the  progeny.  This  latter 
suggestion  is  inferential  and  has  been  sustained  by  many  similar 
experiences,  but  without  this  as  a  start  it  would  be  exceedingly 
difficult  to  account  for  the  rapid  increase  in  the  height  of  the 
English  race  horse.  It  is  certainly  true  that  the  chief  aim  of  the 
English  breeder  of  that  day  was  to  increase  the  size,  without  los- 
ing symmetry  and  style,  and  if  he  found  that  foreign  upon  native 
blood  gave  him  a  start  in  that  direction,  he  was  wise  in  the  com- 
mingling. Another  consideration,  growing  out  of  the  rural  econ- 
omy of  the  people,  doubtless  had  a  very  wide  influence  in  the 
direction  of  wiping  out  the  pacer,  in  this  period  of  transition. 


ANTIQUITY   AND   HISTORY   OF   THE   PACING   HORSE.  169 

Long  journeys  in  the  saddle  became  less  frequent,  good  roads 
began  to  appear  and  vehicles  on  wheels  took  the  place  of  the  saddler 
and  the  pack  horse.  To  get  greater  weight  and  strength  for  this 
service,  recourse  was  had  to  crosses  with  the  larger  and  courser 
breeds,  and  through  these  channels  have  come  the  giants  and  the 
pigmies  of  the  modern  race  course.  Under  the  changed  condi- 
tions of  travel  and  transportation  it  is  not  remarkable  that  the 
people  should  have  been  willing  to  see  their  long-time  favorites 
disappear,  for  it  is  known  to  every  man  of  experience  that  the 
pace  is  not  a  desirable  gait  for  harness  work.  No  doubt  the  pacer 
is  as  strong  as  the  trotter  of  the  same  size  and  make-up,  but  in 
his  smooth,  gliding  motion  there  is  a  suggestion  of  weakness  com- 
municated to  his  driver  that  is  never  suggested  by  the  bold, 
bounding  trotter.  The  antagonism  between  the  pacers  and  the 
new  horses  of  Saracenic  origin  was  irreconcilable  and  one  or  the 
other  had  to  yield.  As  the  management  of  the  contest  was  in 
the  hands  of  the  master  the  result  could  be  easily  foreseen,  for  if 
one  cross  failed,  another  followed  and  then  another,  till  the  Sara- 
cenic blood  was  completely  dominant  in  eliminating  the  lateral 
and  implanting  the  diagonal  action  in  its  stead. 

As  no  home-bred  pacer,  of  any  type  or  breed,  has  been  seen  in 
England  for  nearly  two  hundred  years,  it  is  not  remarkable  that 
Englishmen  of  good  average  intelligence,  for  the  past  two  or  three 
generations,  have  lived  and  died  supposing  they  knew  all  about 
horses,  and  yet  did  not  know  there  had  ever  been  such  a  thing  in 
England  as  a  breed  of  pacing  horses.  When,  some  eighteen  or 
twenty  years  ago,  I  called  the  attention  of  Mr.  H.  F.  Euren, 
compiler  of  the  Hackney  Stud  Book,  to  the  early  English  pacers 
as  a  most  inviting  field  in  which  to  look  for  the  origin  of  the 
"Xorfolk  Trotters/'  he  was  surprised  to  learn  that  such  horses 
had  existed  in  England,  but  he  went  to  work  and  gathered  up 
many  important  facts  that  appear  in  the  first  volume  of  the 
Hackney  compilation.  Many  of  these  facts,  but  in  less  detail, 
had  already  appeared,  from  time  to  time,  in  Wallace's  Monthly, 
but  Mr.  Euren's  was  the  first  modern  English  publication  to 
place  them  before  English  readers.  From  this  prompting,  Mr. 
Euren  did  well,  but  we  must  go  back  a  little  to  see  how  this  sub- 
ject was  treated  by  English  writers  of  horse  books,  who  wrote 
without  any  promptings  from  this  side. 

Mr.  William  Youatt  was  a  voluminous  writer  on  domestic 
animals,  and  at  one  time  was  looked  upon  as  the  highest  author- 


170  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

ity  on  the  horse,  both  in  England  and  in  this  country.  He  seems 
to  have  been  a  practitioner  of  veterinary  surgery,  and  from  the 
number  of  volumes  which  he  published  successfully,  he  must 
have  been  a  man  of  ability  and  education.  There  can  be  no 
question  that  he  knew  a  great  deal — quite  too  much  to  know  any- 
thing well.  The  first  edition  of  his  work  on  the  horse  was  pub- 
lished in  1831,  and  soon  after  its  appearance  several  publishing 
houses  in  this  country  seized  upon  it  as  very  valuable,  and  each 
one  of  them  soon  had  an  edition  of  it  before  the  public.  It  pur- 
ports to  have  been  written  at  the  instance  of  "The  Society  for 
the  Diffusion  of  Useful  Knowledge."  This  declaration  was  a 
good  thing,  in  a  commercial  view,  and  no  doubt  it  did  much  in 
extending  the  circulation  of  the  book.  Without  tarrying  to  note 
several  minor  historical  blunders,  I  will  go  direct  to  one  relating 
to  the  gait  of  the  horse,  which  is  now  under  consideration.  In 
his  fourth  edition,  page  535,  he  incidentally  discusses  the  mech- 
anism of  the  pace,  and  after  speaking  of  the  Elgin  Marbles,  to 
which  I  have  referred  at  the  beginning  of  this  chapter,  and  after 
conceding  that  two  of  the  four  horses  are  not  galloping  but  pac- 
ing, he  says: 

"  Whether  this  was  then  the  mode  of  trotting  or  not,  it  is  certain  that  it  is 
never  seen  to  occur  in  nature  in  the  present  day;  and,  indeed,  it  appears  quite 
inconsistent  with  the  necessary  balancing  of  the  body,  and  was,  therefore,  more 
probably  an  error  of  the  artist." 

This  remark  is  simply  amazing  in  an  author  who  pretentiously 
undertakes  to  instruct  his  countrymen  in  the  history  of  the  horse 
when  he  knows  nothing  about  that  history.  If  he  had  gone  back 
only  twenty-two  years,  "Old  John  Lawrence,"  in  his  splendid 
quarto,  would  have  told  him  about  the  pacer.  If  he  had  gone 
back  one  hundred  and  sixty  years,  the  Duke  of  Newcastle  would 
have  explained  to  him  the  complete  and  perfect  mechanism  of 
the  pacing  gait.  If  he  had  gone  still  further  back  and  examined 
Gervaise  Markham,  Blundeville,  Polydore  Virgil,  and  Fitz 
Stephen  the  Monk,  of  the  twelfth  century,  any  and  all  of  them 
would  have  explained  to  him  the  pacing  habit  of  action  and  shown 
him  that  for  many  successive  centuries  the  pacing  horse  was  the 
popular  and  fashionable  horse  of  the  realm.  If  Mr.  Youatt  had 
lived  to  see  John  R.  Gentry  pace  a  mile  in  2:OOJ;  Robert  J.  in 
2:01-J,  and  dozens  of  others  in  less  than  2:10,  he  might  have 
changed  his  mind  and  concluded  that  it  was  possible,  after  all,  for 


ANTIQUITY   AND   HISTORY   OF  THE   PACING   HORSE.  1?1 

a  horse  to  travel  at  the  lateral  gait  without  toppling  over.  From 
Mr.  Youatt  and  a  few  other  modern  English  authors,  most  of  our 
American  writers  on  the  horse  have  derived  what  little  mental 
pabulum  they  thought  they  needed,  and  thus  an  error  at  the 
fountain  has  been  carried  into  all  the  ramifications  of  our  horse 
literature.  Only  two  or  three  years  ago  a  very  intelligent  gentle- 
man, who  had  attained  great  eminence  as  a  veterinary  surgeon, 
especially  for  his  knowledge  and  treatment  of  the  horse's  foot, 
seriously  and  in  good  faith  stoutly  maintained  that  the  pacing 
habit  of  action  was  merely  the  result  of  an  abnormal  condition  of 
the  foot,  and  that  all  pacers  would  trot  just  as  soon  as  their  feet 
were  put  in  the  right  shape.  We  must  not  laugh  at  this  wild 
notion,  for  it  is  really  no  worse  than  Mr.  Youatt's  doubting, 
whether  it  was  possible  for  a  horse  to  balance  himself  at  the 
lateral  motion.  Neither  gentleman  seemed  to  know  anything 
about  the  fact  that  it  was  a  matter  of  inheritance,  and  that  the 
lateral  habit  of  action  had  come  down  by  transmission  through 
all  the  generations  for  a  period  of  more  than  two  thousand  years. 
It  is  hardly  necessary  to  say  that  the  gentleman  who  was  so  con- 
fident that  the  pace  was  merely  the  result  of  the  abnormal  condi- 
tion of  the  feet  brought  his  notions  about  the  pacer  from  across 
the  water.  He  was  an  Anglo-American,  and  could  make  a  pacer 
into  a  trotter  in  a  jiffy,  by  using  the  paring-knife.  He  was  an 
intelligent  man  and  a  skillful  veterinarian,  but  there  were  no 
pacers  in  England  and  there  should  be  none  here.  Toward  the 
close  of  the  chapter  on  The  Colonial  Horses  of  Virginia,  will  be 
found  the  observations  of  an  English  tourist  in  1795-96  who  is 
very  certain  that  there  is  some  mistake  about  the  pacer,  and  will 
not  be  convinced  there  are  any,  unless  they  are  artificially  created. 
Having  now  completed  what  I  had  to  say  about  the  old  English 
pacer,  it  is  next  in  order  to  consider  his  descendants  in  this 
country  and  the  relations  they  bear  to  the  American  trotter. 


CHAPTEE    XIV. 

THE   AMERICAN    PACER   AND     HIS     RELATIONS  TO   THE    AMERICAN" 

TROTTER. 

Regulations  against  stallions  at  large — American  pacers  taken  to  tLe  West 
Indies — Narragansett  pacers;  many  foolish  and  groundless  theories  about 
their  origin — Dr.  McSparran  on  the  speed  of  the  pacer — Mr.  Updike's 
testimony — Mr.  Hazard  and  Mr.  Enoch  Lewis— Exchanging  meetings 
with  Virginia — Watson's  Annals — Matlack  and  Acrelius — Rip  Van  Dam's 
horse — Cooper's  evidence — Cause  of  disappearance — Banished  to  the  fron- 
tier— First  intimation  that  the  pace  and  the  trot  were  essentially  one  gait 
— How  it  was  received — Analysis  of  the  two  gaits — Pelham,  Highland 
Maid,  Jay-Eye-See,  Blue  Bull — The  pacer  forces  himself  into  publicity — 
Higher  rate  of  speed — Pacing  races  very  early — Quietly  and  easily  devel- 
oped— Comes  to  his  speed  quickly — His  present  eminence  not  permanent — 
The  gamblers  carried  him  there — Will  he  return  to  his  former  obscurity  ? 

IN  the  several  chapters  devoted  to  "Colonial  Horse  History" 
will  be  found  all  the  leading  facts  that  I  have  been  able  to  glean 
from  the  early  sources  of  information.  With  the  exceptions  of 
the  horses  brought  from  Utrecht  in  Holland  to  New  Amsterdam 
(New  York),  two  shiploads  that  sailed  out  of  the  Zuider  Zee  and 
landed  at  Salem,  Massachusetts,  and  those  brought  from  Sweden 
by  the  colonists  that  settled  on  the  Delaware,  all  the  early  im- 
portations came  from  England.  As  much  the  larger  number  of 
those  from  England  and  Sweden  were  pacers,  the  breeds  and 
habits  of  action  were  soon  mixed  up,  as  those  who  had  no  pacers 
wanted  pacers  for  the  saddle,  and  those  who  wanted  more  size, 
regardless  of  the  gait,  were  always  ready  to  supply  their  want  by 
an  exchange  of  their  saddle  horses  for  more  size.  The  Dutch 
horses  were  certainly  something  over  fourteen  hands  and  the  Eng- 
lish and  Swedish  horses  were  perhaps  nearer  thirteen  than  fourteen 
hands.  The  colonists  from  the  first,  and  from  one  end  of  the 
land  to  the  other,  seem  to  have  appreciated  the  importance  of  in- 
creasing the  size  and  strength  of  their  horse  stock,  and  this  was 
very  hard  to  do  under  the  conditions  then  prevailing  of  allowing 
their  horses  to  roam  at  large.  Hence,  stringent  regulations  were- 


RELATIONS   OF  THE   AMERICAN   PACER   TO   THE   TROTTER.      173 

adopted  in  all  the  colonies  against  permitting  immature  entire 
colts  and  stallions  under  size  to  wander  where  they  pleased.  It 
is  doubtful  whether  these  regulations  were  any  more  effective 
than  those  of  Henry  VIII.,  for  while  there  was  some  increase,  it 
was  hardly  perceptible  until  after  the  close  of  the  colonial  days. 
The  real  increase  did  not  commence  till  the  farmers  had  provided 
themselves  with  facilities  for  keeping  their  breeding  stock  at 
home. 

It  is  very  evident  from  the  statistics  of  size  and  gait,  as  given 
in  the  chapters  referred  to  above,  that  our  forefathers  wisely 
selected  the  most  compact,  strong  and  hardy  animals  they  could 
find  in  England  as  the  type  best  adapted  to  fight  their  way 
against  the  hardships  of  a  life  in  the  wilderness  of  the  new  world. 
There  have  been  some  attempts,  wholly  fanciful  and  baseless,  to 
trace  importations  from  other  countries,  outside  of  those  men- 
tioned above,  but  all  such  attempts  have  proven  wholly  imaginary 
and  worse  than  futile.  In  less  than  twenty  years  after  the  New 
England  colonies  received  their  first  supply  they  commenced 
shipping  horses  by  the  cargo  to  Barbadoes  and  other  West  India 
Islands.  This  trade  was  cultivated,  extended  to  all  the  islands, 
and  continued  during  the  remainder  of  the  seventeenth  and 
practically  the  whole  of  the  eighteenth  century.  The  pacers  of 
the  American  colonies  were  exceedingly  popular  and  sought  after 
by  the  Spanish  as  well  as  the  Dutch  and  English  islands.  In- 
deed, the  planters  of  Cuba  alone  carried  away  at  high  prices 
nearly  all  the  pacers  that  New  England  could  produce.  They 
knew  nothing  about  pacers  for  the  saddle  until  they  had  tried 
them  and  then  they  would  have  nothing  else.  These  continuous 
raids  of  the  Spaniards  of  the  West  Indies  upon  the  pacers  of 
New  England,  and  Ehode  Island  especially,  has  been  assigned, 
by  the  local  historians  of  that  State  as  one  of  the  principal 
causes  of  the  decadence  and  practically  final  disappearance  of  the 
Narragansett  pacer  from  the  seat  of  his  triumphs  and  his  fame. 
It  is  just  to  remark  here,  in  passing,  that  if  there  had  been  pacers 
among  the  horses  of  Spain,  the  Spanish  dependencies  would  have 
secured  their  supplies  from  the  mother  country  and  not  have 
come  to  Rhode  Island  and  paid  fabulous  prices  for  them. 

As  all  the  pacing  traditions  of  this  country  to-day  point  to 
the  horses  of  Narragansett  Bay  as  the  source  from  which  our 
modern  pacers  have  derived  their  speed,  we  must  give  some  at- 
tention to  the  various  theories  that  have  been  advanced  as  to  the 


174  THE   HOESE   OF   AMEKICA. 

origin  of  the  Narragansett  horse.  In  time  past,  and  extending 
back  to  a  period  "whereof  the  memory  of  man  runneth  not  to  the 
contrary/7  the  horse  world  has  been  cursed  with  a  class  of  men 
who  have  always  been  ready  to  invent  and  put  in  circulation  the 
most  marvelous  and  incredible  stories  about  the  origin  of  every 
remarkable  horse  that  has  appeared.  Some  of  these  wiseacres 
have  maintained  that  the  original  Narragansett  pacer  was  caught 
wild  in  the  woods  by  the  first  settlers  on  Narragansett  Bay,  while 
others  (and  this  seems  to  be  of  Canadian  origin)  have  insisted 
that  when  being  brought  to  this  country  a  storm  struck  the  ship 
and  the  horse  was  thrown  overboard,  and  after  nine  days  he  was- 
found  off  the  coast  of  Newfoundland  quietly  eating  rushes  on  a 
sand  bar,  where  he  was  rescued  and  brought  into  Narragansett 
Bay.  This  story  of  the  marine  horse  probably  had  its  origin  in 
the  experiences  of  Eip  Van  Dam,  which  will  be  narrated  further 
on.  Another  representation,  coming  this  time  from  a  very 
reputable  source,  has  been  made  as  to  the  origin  of  the  Narragan- 
sett horse,  and  as  many,  no  doubt,  have  accepted  it  as  true,  I 
must  give  it  such  consideration  as  its  prominence  demands.  Mr. 
I.  T.  Hazard,  a  representative  of  the  very  old  and  prominent 
Hazard  family  of  Rhode  Island,  in  a  letter  to  the  Rev.  Mr.  Up- 
dike, makes  the  following  statement: 

"  My  grandfather,  Governor  Robinson,  introduced  the  famous  saddle  horse, 
the  Narragansett  pacer,  known  in  the  last  century  over  all  the  civilized  parts 
of  North  America  and  the  West  Indies,  from  whence  they  have  lately  been 
introduced  into  England,  as  a  ladies'  saddle  horse,  under  the  name  of  th& 
Spanish  Jennet.  Governor  Robinson  imported  the  original  from  Andalusia,  in 
Spain,  and  the  raising  of  them  for  the  West  India  market  was  one  of  the  ob- 
jects of  the  early  planters  of  this  country.  My  grandfather,  Robert  Hazard, 
raised  about  a  hundred  of  them  annually,  and  often  loaded  two  vessels  a  year 
with  them,  and  other  products  of  his  farm,  which  sailed  direct  from  the  South 
Ferry  to  the  West  Indies,  where  they  were  in  great  demand." 

This  theory  of  the  origin  of  the  Narragansett  came  down  to 
Mr.  Hazard  as  a  tradition,  no  doubt,  but  like  a  thousand  other 
traditions  it  has  nothing  to  sustain  it.  Opposed  to  it  there  are 
two  clearly  ascertained  facts,  either  one  of  which  is  wholly  fatal 
to  it.  In  the  first  place,  there  were  no  pacers  in  Andalusia  or 
any  other  part  of  Spain,  and  in  the  second  place,  these  horses, 
according  to  official  data,  were  the  leading  item  of  export  from 
Rhode  Island  in  1680,  and  Governor  Robinson  was  not  born  till 
about  1693.  As  impossibilities  admit  of  no  argument,  I  will  not 


RELATIOXS   OF   THE   AMERICAN   PACER   TO   THE   TROTTER.     175 

mid  another  word  to  this  "Andalusian"  origin  tradition,  except 
to  say  that  a  hundred  years  later,  when  the  pacing  dam  of  Sher- 
man Morgan  was  taken  from  Cranston,  Rhode  Island,  up  into 
Vermont,  she  was  called  a  "Spanish  mare,"  because  Mr.  Hazard 
had  said  the  original  Narragansett  had  come  from  Spain.  The 
story  of  the  descendants  of  the  Narragansetts  having  been  car- 
ried from  the  West  Indies  to  England,  and  there  introduced 
under  the  name  of  the  Spanish  Jennet  as  a  lady's  saddle  horse,  is 
wholly  imaginative.  The  Spanish  Jennet,  whatever  its  gait  may 
have  been,  was  well  known  in  England  many  years  before  the 
first  horse  was  brought  to  any  of  the  American  colonies.  (See 
extracts  from  Blundeville  and  Markham  in  Chapter  XII.) 

After  several  years  of  fruitless  search  for  some  trace  of  the 
early  importations  of  horses  into  the  colony  of  Rhode  Island,  I 
have  reached  the  conclusion  that  probably  no  such  importations 
were  ever  made.  The  colony  of  Massachusetts  Bay  commenced 
importing  horses  and  other  live  stock  from  England  in  1629,  and 
continued  to  do  so  for  several  years  and  until  they  were  fully 
supplied,  as  stated  above.  In  1640  a  shipload  of  horses  were  ex- 
ported to  the  Barbadoes,  and  it  was  about  this  time  that  Rhode 
Island  began  to  assume  an  organized  existence.  Her  people  were 
largely  made  up  of  refugees  from  the  religious  intolerance  of  the 
other  Xew  England  colonies,  and  they  brought  their  families  and 
effects,  including  their  horses,  with  them.  The  blood  of  the 
Narragansett  pacer,  therefore,  was  not  different  from  the  blood 
of  the  pacers  of  the  other  colonies,  but  the  development  of  his 
speed  by  the  establishment  of  a  pacing  course  and  the  offering  of 
valuable  prizes,  naturally  brought  the  best  and  the  fastest  horses 
to  this  colony  and  from  the  best  and  fastest  they  built  up  a  breed 
that  became  famous  throughout  all  the  inhabited  portions  of  the 
Western  Hemisphere.  The  race  track,  with  the  valuable  prizes 
it  offered  and  the  emulation  it  aroused,  was  what  did  it.  As  the 
question  of  origin  is  thus  settled  in  accordance  with  what  is 
known  of  history  and  the  natural  order  of  things,  and  as  the  Nar- 
ragansett is  the  great  tribe  representing  the  lateral  action  then 
and  since,  we  must  consider  such  details  of  history  as  have  come 
down  to  us. 

The  Rev.  James  McSparran,  D.D.,  was  sent  out  by  the  Lon- 
don Society  for  the  Propagation  of  the  Gospel  in  Foreign  Parts,  to 
take  charge  of  an  Episcopal  church  that  had  been  planted  some 
years  before  in  Rhode  Island.  He  arrived  in  1721,  and  lived  till 


176  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

1759.  He  was  an  Irishman,,  and  appears  to  have  been  somewhat 
haughty  and  irascible  in  his  temperament,  and  was  disposed  to 
find  fault  with  the  climate,  the  currency,  the  people,  and  pretty 
much  everything  he  came  in  contact  with.  He  was  a  man  of  ob- 
servation, and  during  the  thirty-eight  years  he  spent  in  minister- 
ing to  the  spiritual  wants  of  his  flock,  he  was  not  unmindful  of 
what  was  passing  around  him,  and  made  many  notes  and  reflec- 
tions on  the  various  phases  of  life  as  they  presented  themselves 
to  his  mind,  and  especially  on  the  products  and  industries  of  the 
colony.  These  notes  and  observations  he  wrote  out,  and  they  were 
published  in  Dublin  in  1753,  under  the  title  of  "America  Dis- 
sected." 

His  writings  do  not  discover  that  he  was  a  man  of  very  ardent 
piety,  but  he  was  honored  as  a  good  man  while  he  lived,  and  was 
buried  under  the  altar  he  had  served  so  long.  His  duties  some- 
times called  him  away  into  Virginia,  and,  in  speaking  of  the 
great  distance  of  one  parish  from  another,  he  uses  the  following 
language : 

"  To  remedy  this  (the  distance),  as  the  whole  province,  between  the  moun- 
tains, two  hundred  miles  up,  and  the  sea,  is  all  a  champaign,  and  without 
stones,  they  have  plenty  of  a  small  sort  of  horses,  the  best  in  the  world,  like 
the  little  Scotch  Galloways;  and  'tis  no  extraordinary  journey  to  ride  from 
sixty  to  seventy  miles  or  more  in  a  day.  I  have  often,  but  upon  larger  pacing 
horses,  rode  fifty,  nay,  sixty  miles  a  day,  even  here  in  New  England,  where 
the  roads  are  rough,  stony  and  uneven." 

The  reverend  gentleman  seems  to  assume  that  his  readers  knew 
the  Scotch  Galloways  were  pacers,  and  with  this  explanation  his 
observations  are  very  plain.  He  makes  no  distinction  between 
the  Virginia  horse  and  his  congener  of  Rhode  Island  except  that 
of  size,  in  which  the  latter  had  the  advantage.  In  speaking  of 
the  products  of  Rhode  Island  he  says: 

"  The  produce  of  this  colony  is  principally  butter  and  cheese,  fat  cattle,  wool, 
and  fine  horses,  which  are  exported  to  all  parts  of  English  America.  They  are 
remarkable  for  fleetness  and  swift  pacing;  and  I  have  seen  some  of  them  pace 
a  mile  in  a  Little  more  than  two  minutes,  and  a  good  deal  less  than  three." 

When  I  first  read  this  sentence  in  the  reverend  doctor's  book 
I  confess  I  was  not  prepared  to  accept  it  in  any  other  light 
than  that  of  a  wild  enthusiast,  who  knew  but  little  of  the  force 
of  the  language  he  used.  To  talk  about  horses  pacing,  a  hun- 
dred and  fifty  years  ago,  in  a  little  more  than  two  minutes  and  a 


DELATIONS   OF  THE   AMERICAN   PACER  TO   THE  TROTTER.      177 

good  deal  less  than  three,  appeared  to  be  simply  monstrous. 
The  language  evidently  means,  according  to  all  fair  rules  of  con- 
struction, that  the  mile  was  performed  nearer  two  minutes  than 
three,  or  in  other  words,  considerably  below  two  minutes  and 
thirty  seconds.  I  doubt  not  my  readers  will  hesitate,  and  per- 
haps refuse,  to  accept  such  a  performance,  just  as  I  did  my- 
self till  I  had  carefully  weighed  not  only  the  character  of  the 
author  of  the  statement,  but  the  circumstances  that  seemed  to 
support  it.  If  the  learned  divine  had  known  no  more  of  the 
world  and  its  ways  than  many  of  his  profession,  I  would  have 
concluded  he  was  not  a  competent  judge  of  speed;  but  he  was  a 
man  of  affairs,  and  knew  perfectly  well  just  what  he  was  saying. 
The  question  naturally  arises  here  as  to  what  opportunities  or 
facilities  the  doctor  had  for  timing  those  pacers  of  a  hundred 
and  fifty  years  ago.  In  a  note  appended  to  the  above  extract  by 
Mr.  Updike,  the  editor  of  the  work,  I  find  the  following: 

"  The  breed  of  horses  called  Narra^ansett  pacers,  once  so  celebrated  for 
fleetness,  endurance  and  speed,  has  become  extinct.  These  horses  were  highly 
valued  for  the  saddle,  and  transported  the  rider  with  great  pleasantness  and 
sureness  of  foot.  The  pure  bloods  could  not  trot  at  all.  Formerly  they  had 
pace-races.  Little  Neck  Beach,  in  South  Kingston,  of  one  mile  in  length,  was 
the  race  course.  A  silver  tankard  was  the  prize,  and  high  bets  were  otherwise 
made  on  speed.  Some  of-  these  prize  tankards  were  remaining  a  few  years  ago. 
Traditions  respecting  the  swiftness  of  these  horses  are  almost  incredible. 

The  facts  stated  by  Mr.  Updike  in  this  note  are  corroborated 
from  other  sources,  and  may  be  accepted  as  true.  These  were 
the  opportunities  and  facilities  the  doctor  had  for  holding  his 
watch,  and  nobody  will  doubt  they  were  sufficient  to  enable  him 
to  be  a  competent  witness.  In  connection  with  this  subject,  and 
as  another  footnote,  Mr.  Updike  introduces  a  letter  from  Mr.  I. 
T.  Hazard,  which  brings  out  another  very  curious  fact  in  the  his- 
tory of  the  pacer.  The  Hazard  family  was  very  eminent  in 
Rhode  Island,  and  many  of  its  members  have  occupied  positions 
of  high  honor  and  responsibility  for  several  generations.  The 
date  of  the  letter  is  not  given,  and  we  may  infer  it  may  have 
been  written  fifty  years  ago,  or  perhaps  more.  Mr.  Hazard  says: 

"  Within  ten  years  one  of  my  aged  neighbors,  Enoch  Lewis,  since  deceased, 
informed  me  he  had  been  to  Virginia  as  one  of  the  riding  boys,  to  return  a 
similar  visit  of  the  Virginians  in  that  section,  in  a  contest  on  the  turf;  and  that 
such  visits  were  common  with  the  racing  sportsmen  of  Narragansett  and 
Virginia,  when  he  was  a  boy.  Like  the  old  English  country  gentlemen,  from 


178  THE    HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

whom  they  were  descended,  they  were  a  horse-racing,  fox-hunting,  feasting 
generation." 

This  paragraph  from  Mr.  Hazard's  pen  has  been  the  subject  of 
very  deliberate  consideration.  The  first  promptings  of  my  judg- 
ment were  to  doubt  and  reject  it,  especially  on  account  of  the 
absence  of  date  to  the  letter,  and  of  the  remote  period  in  which 
Mr.  Enoch  Lewis  must  have  visited  Virginia.  Another  ques- 
tion, as  to  why  we  have  not  this  information  from  any  other 
source  except  Mr.  Hazard,  presented  itself  with  no  inconsiderable 
force.  After  viewing  the  matter  in  all  its  bearings  I  am 
forced  to  concede  that  it  is  likely  to  be  true.  These  visits  must 
have  taken  place  before  the  Revolution,  and  from  the  construc- 
tion we  are  able  to  place  upon  the  dates,  this  was  not  impossible. 
It  is  a  fact  that  I  do  not  hesitate  to  announce  that  before  the 
Revolution  racing  in  all  its  forms  was  more  universally  indulged 
in  as  an  amusement  than  it  ever  has  been  since.  This  was  be- 
fore the  days  of  newspapers,  and  all  we  can  possibly  know  of  the 
sporting  events  of  that  period  we  must  gather  up  from  the  de- 
tached fragments  that  have  come  down  to  us  by  tradition. 
There  was  a  strong  bond  of  sympathy  and  friendship  between  the 
followers  of  Dr.  McSparran  in  Khode  Island,  surrounded  as  they 
were  by  Puritans,  and  their  co-religionists  in  Virginia.  They 
were  accustomed  to  maritime  life,  and  had  abundance  of  vessels 
fitted  up  for  the  shipment  of  horses  and  other  live  stock  to 
foreign  ports.  To  take  a  number  of  their  fastest  pacers  on  board 
one  of  their  sloops  and  sail  for  Virginia  would  not  have  been  con- 
sidered much  of  an  adventure.  These  visits  were  not  only  occa- 
sions of  pleasure  and  festivity,  with  the  incidental  profits  of  win- 
ning purses  and  bets,  but  they  were  a  most  successful  means  of 
advertising  the  Narragansett  pacer;  and  through  these  means 
alone  the  market  was  opened,  as  Dr.  McSparran  expresses  it,  in 
all  parts  of  British  America.  When  we  consider  the  widespread 
fame  of  these  Rhode  Island  horses,  and  that  there  were  no  other 
means  by  which  they  could  have  achieved  it,  except  by  their 
actual  performances,  we  are  forced  to  the  conclusion  that  they 
were  carried  long  distances,  and  in  many  directions,  for  purely 
sporting  purposes.  That  these  visits  would  result  in  the  transfer 
of  a  good  number  of  the  best  and  fastest  horses  from  Narragan- 
sett  to  Virginia  would  be  a  natural  sequence,  and  thus,  in  after 
years,  we  might  look  for  a  strong  infusion  of  Narragansett  blood 
in  the  Virginian  pacing-horse. 


RELATIONS    OF   THE   AMERICAN    PACER   TO   THE   TROTTER.      1791 

It  appears  to  be  a  law  of  our  civilization  that  each  generation 
produces  somebody  who,  out  of  pure  love  for  the  curious  and 
forgotten,  devotes  the  best  years  of  his  life  to  hunting  up  old 
things  that  have  well-nigh  slipped  away  from  the  memory  of 
man.  In  this  class  Mr.  John  F.  Watson  stands  conspicuous 
in  what  he  has  done  for  Philadelphia  and  New  York.  In  1830 
he  published  a  work  entitled  "Annals  of  Philadelphia  and  Penn- 
sylvania," in  two  volumes,  and  among  all  the  antiquated  manners 
and  habits  that  he  again  brings  to  our  knowledge,  he  has  some- 
thing to  say  about  the  horse  of  an  early  day: 

"The  late  very  aged  T.  Matlack,  Esq.,  was  passionately  fond  of  races 
in  his  youth.  He  told  me  of  his  remembrances  about  Race  Street.  In 
his  early  days  the  woods  were  in  commons,  having  several  straggling  forest 
trees  still  remaining  there,  and  the  circular  course  ranging  through  those  trees. 
He  said  all  genteel  horses  were  pacers.  A  trotting-horse  was  deemed  a  base 
breed.  These  Race  Street  races  were  mostly  pace-races.  His  father  and 
others  kept  pacing  stallions  for  propagating  the  breed." 

Mr.  Watson  further  remarks,  on  the  same  subject:  "Thomas 
Bradford,  Esq.,  in  telling  me  of  the  recollections  of  the  races, 
says  he  was  told  that  the  earliest  races  were  scrub  and  pace-races 
on  the  ground  now  used  as  Race  Street." 

The  Rev.  Israel  Acrelius,  for  many  years  pastor  of  the  Swedish 
church  of  Philadelphia,  wrote  a  book  early  in  the  last  century, 
under  the  title,  "History  of  Xew  Sweden,"  which  has  been  trans- 
lated into  English.  In  describing  the  country  and  people,  in 
their  habits  and  amusements,  he  thus  speaks  of  the  horse: 

"  The  horses  are  real  ponies,  and  are  seldom  found  over  thirteen  hands 
high.  He  who  has  a  good  riding  horse  never  employs  him  for  draught,  which 
is  also  the  less  necessary,  as  journeys,  for  the  most  part,  are  made  on  horse- 
back. It  must  be  the  result  of  this,  more  than  to  any  particular  breed  in  the- 
horses,  that  the  country  excels  in  fast  horses,  so  that  horse  races  are  oftea 
made  for  very  high  stakes." 

It  will  be  noted  that  Mr.  Acrelius  does  not  say  that  these  races 
were  pacing-races;  but  when  his  remark  is  taken  in  connection 
with  what  Mr.  Matlack  said  about  the  pacers,  and  when  it  is  con- 
sidered that  he  is  speaking  of  the  speed  of  the  saddle  horses  as 
such,  we  can  easily  understand  his  true  meaning.  In  our  turf 
history  I  supposed  I  was  getting  well  back  when  I  reached 
the  great  race  between  Galloway's  Selim  and  Old  England,  in 
1767,  but  here  we  find  that  race  was  comparatively  modern,  and 
that  the  pacers  antedated  the  gallopers  by  many,  many  years. 


180  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

In  1832  Mr.  Watson  did  the  same  service  for  New  York  that 
he  had  done  for  Philadelphia,  and  published  his  "Annals  of  New 
York/'  in  which  we  find  the  piece  of  horse  history  embodied 
in  the  extract  printed  on  pages  126  and  127,  to  which  the  reader 
will  please  turn. 

It  is  hardly  possible  to  be  mistaken  in  assuming  that  Eip  Van 
Dam's  letter  was  written  to  some  person  in  Philadelphia,  and  that 
Mr.  Watson  saw  it  there.  I  would  give  a  great  deal  for  the  sight  of 
it;  and  if  it  has  been  preserved  in  any  of  the  public  libraries  of  that 
•city,  either  in  type  or  in  manuscript  form,  I  have  good  hopes  of  yet 
inspecting  it.  In  one  point  of  view  it  is  of  exceeding  value,  and 
that  is  its  date.  It  is  fully  established  by  this  letter  that,  as 
early  as  1711,  the  Narragansetts  were  not  only  established  as  a 
breed  or  family,  but  that  their  fame  was  already  widespread. 
This,  of  necessity,  carries  us  back  into  the  latter  part  of  the 
.seventeenth  century,  when  their  exceptional  characteristics  were 
first  developed,  or  began  to  manifest  themselves.  In  reaching 
that  period  we  are  so  near  the  first  importations  of  horses  to  the 
colonies  that  it  is  no  violence  to  either  history  or  good  sense  to 
conclude  that  the  original  Narragansett  was  one  among  the  very 
earliest  importations.  This  plays  havoc  with  some  Rhode  Island 
traditions,  as  will  be  seen  below;  but  with  1711  fixed  as  a  point 
when  the  breed  was  famous,  traditions  must  stand  aside. 

While  on  this  matter  of  dates,  it  may  not  be  unprofitable  to 
compare  the  advent  of  the  Narragansett  with  the  well-known 
epochs  in  horse  history.  Every  schoolboy  knows  that  the  Darley 
Arabian  and  the  Godolphin  Arabian,  say  twenty  years  after,  were 
the  great  founders  of  the  English  race  horse.  The  Narragansetts 
had  reached  the  very  highest  pinnacle  of  fame  before  the  Darley 
Arabian  was  foaled.  Darley  Arabian  reached  England  about  the 
same  year  that  Eip  Van  Dam's  Narragansett  jumped  over  the 
side  of  the  sloop  and  swam  ashore,  and  this  was  eighty  years  be- 
fore there  was  an  attempt  at  publishing  an  English  stud  book. 
When  Janus  and  Othello,  and  Traveller,  and  Fearnaught,  the 
great  founders  of  the  American  race  horse,  first  reached  Virginia, 
they  found  the  Narragansett  pacer  had  been  there  more  than  a 
generation  before.  On  the  point  of  antiquity,  therefore,  the 
Narragansett  is  older  than  what  we  designate  as  the  thorough- 
bred race  horse,  and  if  he  has  a  lineal  descendant  living  to-day 
the  pacer  has  a  longer  line  of  speed  inheritance,  at  his  gait,  than 
the  galloper. 


RELATIONS   OF   THE   AMERICAN   PACER  TO   THE   TROTTER.      181 

The  only  attempt  at  a  description  of  this  breed  that  I  have 
met  with  is  that  given  by  Cooper,  the  novelist,  in  a  footnote  to 
"The  Last  of  the  Mohicans."  This  note  may  be  accepted  as 
history,  so  far  as  it  goes,  and  pretends  to  be  history;  but  I  am 
not  prepared  to  admit  that  all  the  breed  were  sorrels.  This 
color,  no  doubt,  prevailed  in  those  specimens  that  Mr.  Cooper 
had  seen  or  heard  of,  but  I  think  all  colors  prevailed,  as  in 
other  breeds.  He  says: 

"  In  the  State  of  Rhode  Island  there  is  a  bay  called  Narragansett,  so  named 
for  a  strong  tribe  of  Indians  that  formerly  dwelt  on  its  banks.  Accident,  or 
one  of  those  unaccountable  freaks  which  nature  sometimes  plays  in  the  animal 
world,  gave  rise  to  a  breed  of  horses  which  were  once  well  known  in  America 
by  the  name  of  Narragansetts.  They  were  small,  commonly  of  the  color 
called  sorrel  in  America,  and  distinguished  by  their  habit  of  pacing.  Horses 
of  this  race  were,  and  still  are,  in  much  request  as  saddle-horses,  on  account 
of  their  hardiness,  and  the  ease  of  their  movements.  As  they  were  also  sure 
of  foot,  the  Xarragansetts  were  much  sought  for  by  females  who  were  obliged 
to  travel  over  the  roots  and  holes  in  the  new  countries." 

Without  having  a  minute  description  of  so  much  as  a  single  in- 
dividual of  the  race,  I  can  only  infer,  from  general  descriptions, 
as  to  what  their  family  peculiarities  of  form  and  shape  may  have 
been.  It  is  fully  established  that  they  were  very  compact  and 
hardy  horses,  and  that  they  were  not  large;  perhaps  averaging 
about  fourteen  and  a  quarter  hands  in  height.  I  have  met  with 
no  intimation  that  they  were  stylish  or  handsome,  and  we  think 
it  is  safe  to  conclude  that  they  were  plain  in  their  form,  and  low 
in  their  carriage.  From  my  conceptions  of  the  horse  I  think 
one  of  the  better-shaped  Canadian  pacers,  of  fifteen  hands  or 
thereabouts,  might  be  accepted  as  a  fair  representative  of  the 
Xarragansett  of  a  hundred  and  fifty  years  ago.  He  was  fleet, 
hardy,  docile,  and  sure-footed,  but  not  beautiful,  and  it  is  reason- 
able to  suppose  that  the  lack  of  style  and  beauty  was  one  of  the 
leading  causes  of  his  becoming  extinct  in  the  land  of  his  nativity. 

In  considering  the  causes  which  resulted  in  what  we  may  call 
the  dispersal  of  the  Narragansett  pacers,  and  their  extinction  in 
the  seat  of  their  early  fame,  we  must  be  governed  by  what  is 
reasonable  and  philosophical  in  the  industrial  interests  of  the 
people,  rather  than  look  for  some  great  overwhelming  disaster, 
like  an  earthquake,  that  ingulfed  them  in  a  night.  In  speaking 
of  this  dispersal,  and  the  causes  which  led  to  it,  Mr.  Hazard  says: 


182  THE   HOUSE   OF   AMERICA. 

"One  of  the  causes  of  the  loss  of  that  famous  breed  here  was  the  great 
demand  for  them  in  Cuba,  when  that  island  began  to  cultivate  sugar  exten- 
sively. The  planters  became  suddenly  rich,  and  wanted  the  pacing-horse  for 
themselves  and  their  wives  and  daughters  to  ride,  faster  than  we  could  supply 
them,  and  sent  an  agent  to  this  country  to  purchase  them  on  such  terms  as  he 
could,  but  to  purchase  them  at  all  events.  I  have  heard  my  father  say  he 
knew  the  agent  very  well,  and  he  made  his  home  at  the  Rowland  Brown 
House,  at  Tower  Hill,  where  he  commenced  purchasing  and  shipping  until  all 
the  good  ones  were  sent  off.  He  never  let  a  good  one  escape  him.  This,  and 
the  fact  that  they  were  not  so  well  adapted  to  draught  as  other  horses,  was 
the  cause  of  their  being  neglected,  and  I  believe  the  breed  is  now  extinct  in 
this  section.  My  father  described  the  motion  of  this  horse  as  differing  from 
others  in  that  his  backbone  moved  through  the  air  in  a  straight  line,  without 
inclining  the  rider  from  side  to  side,  as  the  common  racker  or  pacer  of  the 
present  day.  Hence  it  was  very  easy;  and  being  of  great  power  of  endurance, 
they  would  perform  a  journey  of  a  hundred  miles  in  a  day,  without  injury  to 
themselves  or  rider." 

We  can  understand  very  well  how  an  enormous  and  unexpected 
demand  from  Cuba,  without  restriction  as  to  price,  should  re- 
duce the  numbers  of  the  breed  very  materially.  But  it  is  a  poor 
compliment  to  the  intelligence  and  thrift  of  the  good  people  of 
Narragansett  to  say  that,  because  there  was  a  lively  demand; 
they  killed  the  goose  that  laid  the  golden  egg  every  day.  It  is  a 
slander  upon  that  Yankee  smartness  which  is  proverbial  to  con- 
clude that  they  deprived  themselves  of  the  means  of  supplying  a 
market  that  was  making  them  all  rich.  We  must,  therefore, 
look  for  other  causes  that  were  more  potent  in  producing  so 
marked  a  result. 

After  more  than  a  hundred  years  of  faithful  service,  of  great 
popularity,  and  of  profitable  returns  to  their  breeders,  the  little 
Narragansetts  began  to  disappear,  just  as  their  ancestors  had  dis- 
appeared a  century  earlier.  Rhode  Island  was  no  longer  a 
frontier  settlement,  but  had  grown  into  a  rich  and  prosperous 
State.  Mere  bridle  paths  through  the  woods  had  developed  into 
broad,  smooth  highways,  and  wheeled  vehicles  had  taken  the 
place  of  the  saddle.  Under  these  changed  conditions,  the  little 
pacer  was  no  longer  desirable  or  even  tolerable  as  a  harness  horse, 
and  he  was  supplanted  by  a  larger  and  more  stylish  type  of  horse, 
better  suited  to  the  particular  kind  of  work  required  of  him. 
This  was  simply  the  ' 'survival  of  the  fittest,"  considering  the 
nature  of  the  services  required  of  the  animal.  The  average 
height  of  the  Narragansett  was  not  over  fourteen  hands  and  one 
inch.  His  neck  was  not  long,  even  for  his  size;  he  dropped 


RELATIONS   OF   THE    AMERICAN    PACER   TO   THE   TROTTER.      183 

rapidly  on  the  croup,  and  his  carriage  was  low,  with  nothing  of 
elegance  or  style  in  his  appearance.  His  mane  and  tail  were 
heavy,  his  hind  legs  were  crooked,  his  limbs  and  feet  were  of  the 
very  best,  but  aside  from  his  great  speed  and  the  smoothness  of 
his  movements  under  the  saddle,  there  was  nothing  very  desira- 
ble or  attractive  about  him.  In  a  contest  with  a  type  of  the  har- 
ness horse,  at  least  one  hand  higher,  of  high  carriage  and  elegant 
appearance,  there  could  only  be  one  result,  and  that  soon  decided. 

As  in  England,  so  in  this  country,  the  blood  of  the  running 
horse  soon  worked  the  extermination  of  the  pacer;  not  because  it 
was  stronger  in  reproducing  itself,  perhaps,  but  because  it  had 
the  skill  and  fancy  of  the  breeder  enlisted  in  selecting  and  mat- 
ing so  as  to  make  the  expunging  process  complete.  Only  a  few 
years  ago  a  pacing  horse  could  hardly  be  found  in  any  of  the 
older  settled  portions  of  the  country,  especially  where  running 
blood  had  become  fashionable.  He  was  literally  banished  to  the 
frontiers  of  Canada,  Indiana,  Missouri,  Kentucky,  and  Tennessee, 
and  especially  in  the  latter  two  States,  where  his  blood  is  still 
appreciated  and  preserved  for  the  luxurious  saddle  gaits  which 
it  alone  transmits.  In  many  individual  cases  he  has  shown  won- 
derful power  in  meeting  and  overcoming  antagonistic  elements, 
but  with  the  tide  of  running  blood  all  against  him,  it  was  only  a 
question  of  time  as  to  how  soon  he  would  be  totally  submerged. 

It  is  only  a  quarter  of  a  century  ago  that  the  first  volume  of 
''Wallace's  American  Trotting  Register"  was  published,  and  then 
began  the  great  task  of  bringing  order  out  of  chaos.  In  a  his- 
torical introduction  to  that  work,  I  inserted  the  following: 

"  So  many  pacing  horses  have  got  fast  trotters,  so  many  pacing  mares  have 
produced  fast  trotters,  and  so  many  pacers  have  themselves  become  fast  trotters, 
and  little  or  nothing  known  of  their  breeding,  that  I  confess  to  a  degree  of 
embarrassment,  from  which  no  philosophy  relieves  me.  If  the  facts  were 
limited  to  a  few  individual  cases  we  could  ignore  the  phenomena  altogether, 
but,  while  they  are  by  no  means  universal,  they  are  too  common  and  apparent 
to  be  thus  easily  disposed  of.  I  am  not  aware  that  any  writer  has  ever  brought 
this  question  to  the  attention  of  the  public;  much  less,  attempted  its  discussion 
and  explanation.  Indeed,  it  is  possible  that  the  observations  of  others  may  not 
sustain  me  in  the  prominence  given  these  phenomena,  but  all  will  concede 
there  are  some  cases  coming  under  this  head  that  are  unexplained,  and  per- 
haps unexplainable.  It  is  probable  trotters  from  this  pacing  origin,  and  that 
appear  to  trot,  only  because  their  progenitors  paced,  will  not  prove  reliable 
producers  of  trotters.  Sucli  an  animal  being  in  a  great  degree  phenomenal, 
should  not  be  too  highly  prized  in  the  stud,  till  he  has  proved  himself  a  trot- 
ting sire  as  well  as  a  trotter." 


184  THE    HOUSE    OF    AMERICA. 

This  very  comprehensive  little  paragraph,  put  modestly  and 
tentatively  rather  than  positively,  contained  a  germ  of  thought 
that  is  to-day  exerting  a  very  wide  influence.  So  far  as  my  knowl- 
edge goes,  this  was  the  first  time  in  which  the  public  attention  had 
ever  been  called  to  the  intimate  relations  between  speed  at  the 
pace  and  speed  at  the  trot.  Some  laughed  at  it  as  not  practical, 
others  sneered  at  it  as  a  theoretical  abstraction,  a  few  gave  it  some 
thought,  while  the  writers  who  never  think  left  it  severely  alone. 
It  required  the  cumulative  experiences  of  nearly  ten  years  before 
horsemen  generally  began  to  think  about  it,  and  then  ten  more; 
before  the  germ  had  matured  itself  in  the  minds  of  all  intelligent 
men  who  were  able  to  divest  themselves  of  their  earlier  preju- 
dices. The  great  primary  truth  now  stands  out  in  high  relief 
that  the  pace  and  the  trot  are  simply  two  forms  of  one  and  the 
same  gait,  that  lies  midway  between  the  walk  and  the  gallop. 
At  last  the  truth,  dimly  foreshadowed  in  the  paragraph  above,  i& 
received  and  accepted,  in  some  form  or  other,  almost  if  not  quite 
universally.  This  fact  and  its  acceptance  are  now  shown  in  all  the 
recorded  experiences  of  racing,  and  especially  in  the  origin  and 
habits  of  action  of  many  of  the  heads  of  trotting  and  pacing 
families,  to  which  the  reader  is  referred. 

At  the  beginning  of  Chapter  XIII.  I  have  labored  to  make 
plain  the  proposition  that  the  pace  and  the  trot  are  simply  two- 
forms  of  one  and  the  same  gait.  This  is  evident  from  the  fact 
that  this  gait,  in  one  form  or  the  other,  is  the  intermediate  link  be- 
tween the  walk  and  the  gallop,  and  this  is  true  among  nearly  all 
quadrupeds.  I  have  also  there  shown,  and  I  think  beyond  cavil,, 
that  the  mechanism  of  the  pace  and  the  trot  is  the  same,  and 
especially  in  the  fact  that  in  both  forms  two  legs  are  used  as  one 
leg.  That  is,  if  the  two  legs  on  the  same  side  move  together,  we 
call  it  the  pace,  and  if  the  diagonal  legs  move  together  we  call  it 
the  trot.  The  rhythm  is  the  same  and  the  sound  is  the  same, 
and  by  the  ear  no  man  can  tell  whether  the  movement  is  at  the 
lateral  or  diagonal  motion.  In  all  the  varieties  of  steps  that  a 
horse  may  be  taught,  and  in  all  the  methods  of  progression  that 
he  may  naturally  adopt,  there  is  no  step  or  movement  in  which 
he  uses  two  legs  as  one  except  in  the  pace  or  the  trot.  From  the 
place,  therefore,  which  these  two  forms  of  the  gait  hold,  indiffer- 
ently, in  animal  movement,  between  the  walk  and  the  gallop; 
from  the  unity  of  action  and  result  in  the  use  of  the  same  mech- 
anism, and  from  the  wide  disparity  between  the  mechanism  of 


RELATIONS   OF  THE   AMERICAN   PACER  TO   THE  TROTTER.      185 

this  gait  and  that  of  all  other  gaits  in  the  action  of  the  horse,  we 
must  conclude  that  the  pace  and  the  trot  are  one  and  the  same 
gait. 

Another  evidence  of  the  unity  of  the  two  forms  of  the  trot  is 
to  be  found  in  the  great  numbers  of  pacers  that  have  been 
changed  over  to  trotters  and  the  astonishing  readiness  with  which 
they  took  to  the  new  form  of  action.  To  go  back  no  further 
than  the  records  sustain  us,  we  find  that  the  converted  pacer 
Pelham  was  the  first  horse  that  ever  trotted  in  2:28.  This  was 
in  1849,  and  four  years  later  the  converted  pacer  Highland 
Maid  trotted  in  2:27.  Twenty  years  later,  Occident,  another, 
trotted  in  2:16f.  These  were  champions  of  their  day,  and  when 
we  come  a  little  nearer  we  find  that  Maud  S.  was  a  pacer  and 
:Sunol  was  a  pacer,  although  neither  of  them  ever  paced  in  public, 
.and  the  fact  that  they  ever  paced  at  all  was  held  as  a  kind  of 
"home  secret."  Since  the  days  of  Pelham,  literally  thousands 
•of  horses  have  been  changed  from  pacers  to  trotters,  and  some 
hundreds  have  been  changed  from  trotters  to  pacers  successfully. 
Then  there  are  quite  a  number,  like  Jay-Eye-See,  2:10  trotting 
.and  2:06i  pacing,  that  have  made  fast  records  at  both  gaits. 

At  one  time  the  pacing  horse  Blue  Bull  stood  at  the  head  of 
ftll  sires  of  trotters  in  this  country,  and  it  is  not  known  or  be- 
lieved that  he  possessed  a  single  drop  of  trotting  blood.  He  was 
a  very  fast  pacer  and  could  do  nothing  else,  and  a  large  percent- 
age of  the  mares  bred  to  him  were  pacers,  and  practically  all  the 
others  had  more  or  less  pacing  blood,  but  his  great  roll  of  trot- 
ters in  the  2:30  list  was  the  wonder  of  all  horsemen  of  that 
period.  Certainly  the  average  of  the  elements  in  his  inheritance 
would  place  him  very  low  in  theory,  but  in  practice  he  struck 
T^ack  to  some  ancestor  that  was  strongly  prepotent.  The  trouble 
in  his  case  is  practically  the  same  as  in  all  other  pacing  stallions 
— the  inheritance  traces  back  to  a  period  more  remote  than  any 
of  the  fast  trotting  stallions,  but  at  intervals  it  has  been  neglected 
and  not  developed  until  it  has  become  weak  and  uncertain  from 
lack  of  use.  The  same  may  be  said  of  the  Copperbottoms, 
Corbeaus,  Flaxtails,  Hiatogas,  Davy  Crockets,  Pilots,  Rainbows, 
Redbucks,  St.  Clairs,  Tippoos,  and  Tom  Hals,  as  well  as  other 
heads  of  minor  families  that  will  be  considered  in  their  proper 
places. 

The  changes  that  have  been  wrought  in  the  status  of  the  pacer 
have  been  truly  wonderful.  Instead  of  being  hidden  away  as  an 


186  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA, 

outcast  and  a  disgrace  to  the  family,  condemned  to  a  life  of  in- 
feriority and  drudgery,  he  has  been  brought  out  and  exhibited  to^ 
the  public  as  a  son  and  heir  and  the  equal  of  the  best.  In  looking" 
back  over  the  trotting  records  of  twenty  years  ago,  any  one  will 
be  surprised  to  observe  that  at  all  the  leading  meetings  of  the' 
whole  country  there  were  no  pacing  contests.  Occasionally  at 
the  minor  and  local  meetings  of  the  middle  Western  States,  a> 
pacing  contest  would  be  given  for  a  small  purse,  in  which  local 
and  obscure  horses  only  would  be  engaged.  Very  naturally  the^ 
owners  of  pacing  horses  protested  against  this  practical  exclusion 
of  their  favorites  from  the  trotting  meetings,  and  employed  all 
their  energies  in  begging  for  admission.  When  they  began  to  be 
really  clamorous  the  managers  of  trotting  tracks  argued  that 
there  could  be  no  profit  to  them  in  opening  pacing  contests,  for 
nobody  cared  about  seeing  a  pacing  match,  that  the  entries  would 
not  fill,  and  especially  that  there  would  be  no  betting,  that,  con- 
sequently, the  pool-sellers  would  have  nothing  to  divide  with  the 
management.  As  the  receipts  for  pool-selling  and  all  other 
gambling  privileges  were  making  the  track  managers  rich,  they 
were  very  slow  about  admitting  an  untried  element  that  might 
diminish  their  profits.  But  gradually  and  patiently  the  pacers 
worked  their  way  into  the  exclusive  circle,  and  when  they  ap- 
peared 'everybody,  especially  in  the  Eastern  States,  was  surprised 
to  see  what  excellent  hordes  they  were  and  the  terrific  speed  they 
showed.  Instead  of  the  typical  pacer,  as  formed  in  the  popular 
mind,  with  the  low  head,  bull  neck,  low  croup,  hairy  legs,  ex- 
uberant mane  and  tail,  and  generally  " Canuck"  all  over,  that 
would  stop  at  the  end  of  the  first  half-mile,  here  was  an  array  of 
horses  that  in  make-up  and  gameness  would  average  just  as  well 
as  the  same  number  of  trotters.  This  was  a  revelation  to  great 
multitudes  of  people,  and  from  that  time  forward  the  pacer  had 
a  fair  show,  on  his  merits.  For  hundreds  of  years  the  pacer, 
with  very  few  exceptions,  has  been  able  to  show  a  little  higher 
rate  of  speed  than  the  trotter.  When  Flora  Temple  smashed  all 
records  in  1859  by  trotting  in  2:19f,  Pocahontas  had  drawn  a 
wagon,  five  years  earlier,  in  2:17-J;  and  when  Maud  S.  trotted  in 
1885  in  2:08f,  this  beat  all  laterals  as  well  as  diagonals,  except 
Johnson,  who  the  year  before  had  paced  in  2:06^.  In  1894  Alix 
trotted  a  mile  in  2:03f,which  stands  the  best  at  this  writing,  but  the 
same  year  Robert  J.  paced  in  2:01-J,  and  John  E.  Gentry  in  2: 
in  1896. 


RELATIONS   OF  THE   AMERICAN    PACER   TO   THE   PACER.        187 

It  is  not  my  purpose  here  to  undertake  to  discuss  the  reasons 
for  the  almost  continuous  supremacy  of  the  pacer  over  the  trot- 
ter, for  there  is  no  data  from  which  I  might  frame  a  conclusion 
that  would  really  "hold  water."  At  best,  therefore,  I  can  only 
suggest  two  or  three  thoughts.  Speed  at  the  pace  is  older,  and  has 
been  longer  in  the  process  of  development,  than  speed  at  the 
trot.  In  1747  pacing  races  had  then  been  fashionable  in  Mary- 
land, and  had  been  carried  on  in  that  colony  time  out  of  mind, 
but  we  have  no  trace  of  trotting  races.  One  year  later  (1748) 
"running,  pacing  and  trotting"  races  had  become  so  numerous 
and  so  common  in  the  colony  of  New  Jersey  that  they  were  de- 
clared a  nuisance  and  suppressed  by  the  legislative  authority. 
My  impression  from  the  language  of  the  act  is  that  it  was  aimed 
chiefly  at  the  running  and  the  pacing  races,  and  that  the  trotters 
were  not  very  numerous.  It  seems  to  be  a  reasonable  conclusion 
that  this  racing  mania  in  New  Jersey  took  its  rise  about  1665, 
when  Governor  Nicolls  established  the  Newmarket  race  course 
on  Long  Island,  and  if  so,  it  had  been  growing  in  strength  for 
over  eighty  years,  and  if  we  add  the  time  from  then  till  now  we 
find  that  the  speed  of  the  pacer  has  been  going  on  almost 
continuously  for  over  two  hundred  years  in  our  own 
country.  There  is  another  fact  entering  into  the  rural  life 
of  colonial  times  that  must  not  be  left  out  of  consideration. 
The  pacer  was  the  universal  saddle  horse,  and  the  trotter  never 
was  tolerated  for  that  service.  Every  farmer's  son  had  his  saddle 
horse,  and  when  two  of  them  met  what  so  natural  and  common  as 
to  determine  then  and  there  which  was  the  faster,  if  a  little 
stretch  of  road  offered?  In  these  neighborhood  rivalries,  if  not 
in  actual  racing,  the  instinct  of  speed  at  the  pace  was  kept  alive 
and  developed,  from  generation  to  generation.  If  I  am  right  in 
this  little  study  of  colonial  life,  we  can  understand  that  the  in- 
heritance of  speed  at  the  pace  has  come  down  to  our  own  time 
through  a  great  many  generations  of  pacers,  and  hence  the  pace 
is  the  faster  gait.  There  is  one  fact  in  our  own  experience  that 
seems  to  sustain  this  with  great  force,  and  that  is  the  small 
amount  of  "pounding"  that  the  pacer  requires  in  order  to  reach 
the  full  development  of  his  powers.  There  is  no  need  of  driving 
a  pacer  to  death  in  order  to  teach  him  how  to  pace,  for  he  already 
knows  how  to  pace,  and  all  that  is  needed  in  the  way  of  training 
is  to  get  him  into  high  condition.  It  may  be  possible  that  the 
lateral  action  is  faster  than  the  diagonal  because  it  is  less  compli- 


188  THE   HORSE   OF   AMEEICA. 

cated,  but  I  can  see  no  anatomical  reason  for  this,  as  the  two  legs 
in  both  gaits  act  as  one  leg.  The  only  difference  I  can  see  in 
practice  is  that  the  trotter  has  more  up-and-down  motion  than 
the  pacer;  that  is,  he  bounds  in  every  revolution,  describing  a 
series  of  depressed  curves  with  his  back  as  he  moves,  while  the 
pacer  rises  less  from  the  ground  with  his  hind  feet  and  seems  to 
glide  instead  of  bound;  in  other  words,  there  is  less  action  thrown 
away  by  the  pacer  than  the  trotter,  and  this  may  arise  from 
the  more  complex  action  in  the  diagonal  than  in  the  lateral 
motion. 

The  pacer  has  reached  a  higher  acclivity  than  the  trotter,  but 
he  is  not  so  well  assured  in  his  footing.  His  present  popularity 
and  his  upward  flight  are  phenomenal,  but  the  causes  that  have 
sent  him  there  are  abnormal  and  not  lasting.  In  his  best  in- 
dividualities he  is  simply  a  gambling  machine  when  in  the  hands 
of  unscrupulous  men,  to  be  manipulated  in  whatever  direction 
lie  will  make  the  most  money.  Eacing,  at  whatever  gait,  is  not 
necessarily  demoralizing  nor  disreputable,  but  when  it  falls  into 
the  control  of  the  "professionals"  it  becomes  both.  So  long  as 
it  remains  under  the  control  of  the  breeders  it  is  not  only  honor- 
able and  legitimate  for  them  to  develop  and  race  their  stock, 
but  it  is  a  necessary  adjunct  to  their  business,  for  they  must  thus 
bring  their  products  before  the  public,  if  they  expect  to 
make  their  business  pay.  Breeders  should  not  own  race  tracks, 
or  if  they  do,  they  should  have  no  part  nor  lot  in  the  percentage 
uniformly  paid  fdr  the  gambling  privilege. 

The  history  of  racing  in  this  country  teaches  over  and  over 
again  that  whenever  the  breeding  and  racing  interest  falls  into 
the  control  of  gamblers,  down  goes  the  whole  interest  and  honest 
men  suffer  with  the  rogues.  The  grasping  track  managers  are 
to-day  complaining  loudly  that  they  cannot  afford  to  give  trot- 
ting meetings  unless  they  are  allowed  to  bring  in  the  pool-sellers 
and  make  them  divide  the  "swag"  with  the  track.  Every  at- 
tempt by  legislatures  to  make  gambling  on  races  a  felony  outside 
the  race  track  and  a  virtue  inside  is  a  most  arrant  humbug  and 
most  destructive  in  its  results.  It  makes  the  race  track  a  cess- 
pool of  every  vice,  and  a  stench  in  the  nostrils  of  every  honest 
man  and  decent  woman.  The  moral  sense  of  the  people  all  over 
this  country  is  being  aroused,  and  if  public  gambling  cannot  be 
suppressed  on  horse  races,  then  history  will  repeat  itself  and 
horse  racing  will  be  wiped  out.  The  gamblers  and  their  friends 


RELATIONS    OF    THE    AMERICAN    PACER   TO    THE    TROTTER. 

will  sneer  at  this  as  "puritanism,"  but  no  difference  about  the 
name — it  will  come. 

But,  destructive  and  ruinous  as  gambling  on  races  may  be  to 
the  life  and  moral  character  of  young  men,  as  well  as  to  the 
material  interests  of  honest  and  reputable  breeders,  it  hardly 
comes  within  my  province  to  discuss  it  further  in  this  place,  and 
therefore  I  will  return  to  the  consideration  of  the  pacer.  As 
the  historical  periodicity  is  now  looming  in  sight  when  the  moral 
sense  of  the  people  will  command  the  suppression  of  racing  of 
every  kind,  the  question  becomes  exceedingly  pertinent  as  to 
what  is  to  become  of  the  pacer?  He  will  no  longer  be  of  any 
value  as  a  gambling  machine,  the  days  of  the  saddle  horse  are 
past  as  a  means  of  travel,  except  by  a  few  about  the  parks  of  the 
cities,  and  however  uppish  and  handsome  he  may  be,  he  is  not 
and  never  will  be  a  desirable  driving  horse  in  harness.  We  have 
already  used  sufficient  of  his  blood  to  create  the  American  Saddle 
Horse,  and  if  the  saddle  horse  shall  produce  ''after  his  kind"  we 
need  no  more  infusions  from  the  pure  pacer.  In  the  trotter  his 
blood  has  leavened  everything,  and  in  some  lines  more  than  we 
desire  or  need.  He  has  been  a  great  source  of  trotting  speed, 
and  if,  as  I  am  inclined  to  believe,  Messenger's  power  to  transmit 
trotting  speed  came  from  the  old  English  pacer,  then  the  pacer  is 
the  only  source  of  that  speed.  Under  the  condition  of  things  as 
here  foreshadowed  he  will  probably  sink  back  into  the  obscurity 
from  which  he  emerged  twenty  years  ago. 


CHAPTER  XV. 

THE   AMERICAN   SADDLE   HORSE. 

'The  saddle  gaits  conie  only  from  the  pacer — Saddle  gaits  cultivated  three  hun- 
dred years  ago — Markhain  on  the  saddle  gaits — The  military  seat  the  best 
— The  unity  of  the  pace  and  trot — Gaits  analyzed — Saddle  Horse  Register — 
Saddle  horse  progenitors — Denmark  not  a  thoroughbred  horse. 

IN  the  preceding  chapters  the  pacer  has  been  considered  from 
the  standpoint  of  his  antiquity,  history,  speed  at  the  pace,  and 
his  contributions  to  speed  at  the  trot.  We  now  come  to  consider 
him  as  the  founder  of  the  best  and  most  delightful  type  of  saddle 
horses  in  the  world.  This  estimate  of  his  quality  and  value  had 
a  solid  foundation  in  the  judgment  and  habits  of  our  ancestors  at 
an  early  period  in  our  history.  When  our  patriotic  forbears 
entered  upon  the  struggle  for  independence,  they  were  fully 
alive  to  the  necessity  of  foreign  sympathy  and  aid.  For  this 
purpose  agents  were  sent  abroad  to  enlist  the  good  feelings  and, 
if  possible,  secure  co-operation  of  foreign  governments,  especially 
that  of  France.  Mr.  Silas  Dean  was  sent  to  Paris,  and  in  a  com- 
munication to  the  secret  committee  of  Congress,  under  date  of 
November  28,  1776,  he  writes:  "I  wish  I  had  here  one  of  your 
best  saddle  horses,  of  the  American  or  Rhode  Island  breed — a 
present  of  that  kind  would  be  money  well  laid  out  with  a  certain 
personage."  This  was  probably  intended  as  a  present  to  Marie 
Antoinette,  or  some  other  person  having  great  influence  at  court. 
It  further  indicates  that  "the  American  or  Rhode  Island  Saddle 
Horse"  was  at  that  period,  in  Mr.  Dean's  opinion  at  least,  the 
best  in  the  world.  (See  Dean  Papers,  New  York  Historical 
Society,  Vol.  I.,  p.  377.) 

To  the  man  of  average  intelligence  and  candor  on  horse  sub- 
jects it  certainly  is  not  necessary  to  enter  upon  an  elaborate  dis- 
cussion to  show  that  the  saddle  gaits  come  from  the  pacer,  but  a 
certain  class  of  writers,  who  neither  declare  nor  attempt  to  prove 
their  position,  constantly  imply  that  the  saddle  gaits  came  from 
the  "thoroughbred."  As  it  is  better,  therefore,  to  make  every- 


THE   AMERICAN   SADDLE   HORSE.  191 

thing  plain  as  we  go  along,  I  will  very  briefly  consider  this 
point.  Twelve  years  ago,  through  Wallace's  Monthly,  I  presented 
the  following  questions  to  all  gentlemen  interested  in  saddle- 
horse  affairs  and  acquainted  with  saddle-horse  history:  "Are  all 
the  tribes  and  families  noted  for  their  saddle  qualities  descended 
in  whole  or  in  part  from  pacing  ancestry?"  In  order  to  cover 
the  whole  question,  no  difference  from  what  standpoint  it  might 
be  considered,  I  added  the  following:  '"Has  any  family  or  sub- 
family of  saddle  horses  come  from  pure  running  ancestry  and 
without  any  admixture  of  pacing  blood?"  To  these  questions 
Major  Hord,  then  editor  of  the  Spirit  of  the  Farm,  at  Nashville, 
Tennessee,  a  gentleman  of  very  wide  and  accurate  knowledge  on 
this  subject,  but  strongly  in  favor  of  running  blood,  made  the 
following  response  through  his  paper: 

"We  can  only  draw  conclusions  from  established  facts  in  reference  to  these 
questions,  for  we  do  not  think  they  can  be  answered  otherwise,  as  the  original 
ancestry  of  our  best  saddle  families  is  more  or  less  clouded  in  obscurity.  It  is 
an  established  fact,  demonstrated  by  experience,  that  in  order  to  get  a  saddle 
horse,  the  quickest  and  most  successful  way  is  to  get  in  the  pacing  blood;  it 
matters  not  how  good  or  bad  the  other  blood  may  be,  a  strong  dash  of  pacing 
blood  will  almost  invariably  improve  the  animal  for  saddle  purposes,  and  never, 
under  any  circumstances,  does  a  pacing  cross  detract  from  an  animal's  qualities 
for  the  saddle.  Judging  from  these  facts,  we  conclude  that  all  our  saddle 
families  are  descended,  at  least  in  part,  from  pacing  ancestry.  On  the  other 
hand,  all  our  best  saddle  families  have  a  strong  infusion  of  thoroughbred  run- 
ning blood.  This  blood,  however,  is  valuable  only  for  the  courage,  bone,  and 
finish  it  gives  the  animal,  for  it  imparts  none  of  the  saddle  gaits;  and  while 
we  have  secured  the  best  results  in  breeding  the  saddle  horse  by  mixing  the 
running  and  pacing  blood,  we  have  observed  that  too  much  running  blood  in 
the  stallion  detracts  from  his  success  as  a  sire  of  saddle  stock.  As  a  rule,  no 
trainer's  skill  can  make  a  good  saddle  horse  out  of  a  thoroughbred  runner, 
whereas  if  you  mix  two  or  more  strong  pacing  crosses  on  top  of  the  running 
blood,  a  child  can  gait  the  produce  to  the  saddle.  We  have  sometimes  seen 
good  saddle  horses  that  were  thoroughbreds,  but  have  never  seen  a  perfect  one. 
Our  observation  and  experience  lead  us  to  the  conclusion  fhat  the  natural  saddle 
gaits  come  from  the  pacers,  but  to  the  runner  we  are  indebted  for  the  size, 
style,  bone  and  finish  of  our  saddle  stock." 

In  this  reply,  when  the  author  says  "all  of  our  saddle  families 
are  descended,  at  least  in  part,  from  pacing  ancestry,"  and  when 
he  adds  to  this  that  "running  blood  imparts  none  of  the  saddle 
gaits,"  he  has  answered  both  questions  very  fully  and  very  satis- 
factorily. The  argument  that  running  blood  gives  bone  and 
finish,  and  all  that,  is  very  well  as  a  theory  of  breeding,  but  it 


THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

has  nothing  to  do  with  the  questions  propounded.  As  all 
families  of  saddle  horses  have  pacing  blood,  and  as  there  is  no 
family  without  it,  it  may  be  taken  as  settled  that  the  saddle 
gaits  come  from  the  pacer. 

I  notice  that  at  least  one  of  the  present  saddle  gaits  was  culti- 
vated more  than  three  hundred  years  ago.  Mr.  Gervaise  Mark- 
ham,  a  writer  of  the  sixteenth  century,  and  probably  the  second 
English  author  on  the  horse,  says:  "If  you  buy  a  horse  for 
pleasure  the  amble  is  the  best,  in  which  you  observe  that  he 
moves  both  his  legs  on  one  side  together,  neat  with  complete  de- 
liberation, for  if  he  treads  too  short  he  is  apt  to  stumble,  if  too 
large  to  cut  and  if  shuffling  or  rowling  he  does  it  slovenly  and 
besides  rids  no  ground.  If  your  horse  be  designed  for  hunting, 
a  racking  pace  is  most  expedient,  which  little  differs  from  the 
amble,  only  is  more  active  and  nimble,  whereby  the  horse  ob- 
serves due  motion,  but  you  must  not  force  him  too  eagerly,  lest 
being  in  confusion  he  lose  all  knowledge  of  what  you  design  him 
to,  and  so  handle  his  legs  carelessly."  The  orthography  of  the 
work  "rack"  as  used  by  Markham  is  "wrack/'  and  this  is  the 
only  place  I  have  met  with  it  in  any  of  the  old  authors.  Webster 
defines  the  word  "rack"  as  "a  fast  amble/'  but  Markham  uses  it 
in  contradistinction  from  the  amble.  It  is  worthy  of  note  here 
that  the  word  "rack"  is  older  than  the  word  "pace,"  in  its  use 
as  designating  the  particular  gait  of  the  horse,  and  through  all 
the  centuries  it  has  been  retained.  Of  all  the  gaits  that  are 
subsidiary  to  the  pace  and  derived  from  that  gait,  the  rack  is 
probably  the  most  common,  and  in  many  sections  of  the  country 
the  pacer  is  called  a  racker.  Eacking  is  often  designated  as 
"single -footing,"  and  in  this  gait  as  well  as  in  the  running  walk 
and  fox  trot,  there  are  four  distinct  impacts  in  the  revolution. 
It  follows,  then,  that  they  are  not  susceptible  of  a  very  high  rate 
of  speed. 

In  all  the  services  which  the  horse  renders  and  in  all  the  rela- 
tions which  he  bears  to  his  master,  there  is  no  relation  in  which 
they  can  be  made  to  appear  to  such  great  mutual  advantage  as 
when  the  one  animal  is  carrying  the  other  on  his  back.  There 
is  no  occasion  on  which  a  beautiful  horse  looks  so  well  as  when 
gracefully  mounted  and  skillfully  handled  by  a  lady  or  gentle- 
man. And,  I  will  add,  there  is  no  occasion  when  a  lady  or  gen- 
tleman, who  is  at  home  in  the  saddle,  looks  so  well  as  when 
mounted  on  a  beautiful  and  well-trained  American  horse.  Eng- 


THE   AMERICAN   SADDLE   HORSE.  193 

land  has  no  saddle  horses,  and  never  can  have  any  till  she  secures 
American  blood  and  adopts  American  methods.  The  shortening 
of  the  stirrups  and  the  swinging  up  and  down  like  a  tilt-hammer 
is  not,  with  our  English  friends,  a  matter  of  choice,  but  a  neces- 
sity to  avoid  being  jolted  to  death.  Their  very  silly  imitators, 
on  this  side,  think  they  can't  afford  to  be  out  of  the  fashion,  be- 
cause "it's  English,  you  know."  For  safety,  true  gentility,  and 
comfort  the  military  seat  is  the  only  seat,  and  if  you  have  a 
horse  upon  which  you  can't  keep  that  seat  without  punishment, 
he  is  no  saddle  horse.  If  your  doctor  tells  you  that  your  liver 
needs  shaking  up,  mount  an  English  trotting  horse,  but  if  you 
ride  for  pleasure  and  fresh  air,  get  a  horse  that  is  bred  and 
trained  to  the  saddle  gaits.  There  is  just  as  much  difference  be- 
tween the  two  horses  as  the  difference  between  a  springless  wagon 
on  a  cobble-stone  pavement  and  a  richly  upholstered  coach  on 
the  asphalt. 

The  American  Saddle  Horse  has  an  origin  as  well  as  a  history. 
His  origin  dates  back  thousands  of  years,  and  his  history  has 
been  preserved  in  art  and  in  letters  since  the  beginning  of  the 
Christian  era.  For  centuries  he  was  the  fashionable  horse  in 
England,  and  the  only  horse  ridden  by  the  nobility  and  gentry. 
Away  back  in  the  reign  of  Elizabeth  it  was  not  an  uncommon 
thing  to  use  hopples  to  teach  and  compel  trotters  to  pace,  just 
as  in  our  day  hopples  are  often  used  to  teach  and  compel  pacers 
to  trot.  In  the  early  settlement  of  the  American  colonies  pacers 
were  far  more  numerous  than  trotters,  and  this  continued  to  be 
the  case  till  after  the  War  of  the  Revolution.  The  great  influx 
of  running  blood  after  that  period  practically  banished  the  pacer 
to  the  western  frontiers,  where  a  remnant  has  been  preserved  for 
the  uses  of  the  saddle;  and  on  account  of  his  great  speed  and 
gameness  he  has  again  returned  to  popular  favor  in  our  own  day. 

The  walk  and  the  canter,  or  short  gallop,  are  gaits  that  are 
common  to  all  breeds  and  varieties  of  horses,  but  what  are  known 
as  "the  saddle  gaits"  are  derived  wholly  from  the  pace  and  are 
therefore  considered  modifications  or  variations  of  the  pace.  In 
regions  of  country  where  the  saddle  horse  is  bred  and  developed 
these  gaits  are  well  known  among  horsemen  and  riders  as  the 
rack  (single-footing),  the  running-walk,  and  the  fox-trot.  These 
gaits  are  not  easily  described  so  as  to  be  understood  without  an 
example  before  the  eye.  The  rack  is  the  most  easily  explained 
so  as  to  be  comprehended,  and  it  is  sometimes  called  the  slow 


194:  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

pace.  In  this  movement  the  hind  foot  strikes  the  ground  an 
instant  before  the  fore  foot  on  the  same  side,  then  the  other  two 
feet  are  moved  and  strike  in  the  same  way;  thus  there  are  four 
strokes  in  the  revolution,  in  pairs.  As  each  foot  has  its  own 
stroke  we  see  the  appositeness  of  the  phrase  i 'single-footing." 
The  four  strokes  are  in  pairs,  as  one,  two — three,  four,  and  in  many 
cases  as  the  speed  of  the  horse  increases  the  interval  between  the 
strokes  is  lost  and  the  horse  is  at  a  clean  rapid  pace.  As  a  mat- 
ter of  course  none  of  these  gaits  in  which  the  horse  makes  four 
strokes  instead  of  two  in  the  revolution  can  be  speedy.  They 
are  not  developed  nor  cultivated  for  speed  alone,  but  for  the  com- 
fort and  ease  of  the  rider  and  the  change  from  one  to  another  for 
the  rest  and  ease  of  the  horse. 

These  "saddle  gaits"  are  always  derivatives  from  the  pace,  and 
I  never  have  seen  one  that  did  not  possess  more  or  less  pacing 
blood.  A  careful  examination  of  the  first  and  second  volumes  of 
"The  National  Saddle  Horse  Register"  establishes  this  fact  be- 
yond all  possible  contradiction.  This  work  is  a  very  valuable 
contribution  to  the  horse  history  of  the  country,  but  it  is  a  mis- 
fortune that  more  care  has  not  been  taken  in  the  exclusion  of 
fictitious  crosses  in  a  great  multitude  of  pedigrees.  This  trouble 
is  specially  apparent  among  the  supposed  breeding  of  many  of 
the  old  stallions  that  are  inserted  as  "Foundation  Stock."  The 
tendency  throughout  seems  to  be  to  cover  up  and  hide  away  the 
very  blood  to  which  we  are  indebted  for  the  saddle  horse,  and  to 
get  in  all  the  blood  possible  that  is  in  direct  antagonism  to  the 
foundation  of  the  saddle  gaits.  It  can  be  accepted  as  a  funda- 
mental truth  in  horse  lore,  that  from  the  day  the  first  English 
race  horse  was  imported  into  this  country  to  the  present  day, 
which  covers  a  period  of  about  one  hundred  and  fifty  years, 
nobody  has  ever  seen,  either  in  England  or  in  this  country,  a 
thoroughbred  horse  that  was  a  pacer.  When  the  old  race  horse 
Denmark  covered  the  pacing  daughter  of  the  pacer  Cockspur, 
the  pacing  blood  of  the  dam  controlled  the  action  and  instincts 
of  the  colt,  and  in  that  colt  we  have  the  greatest  of  saddle- 
horse  sires,  known  as  Games'  Denmark. 

As  this  horse  Denmark  was  by  far  the  greatest  of  all  saddle- 
horse  progenitors,  and  as  his  superiority  has  been  widely 
attributed  to  his  "thoroughbred"  sire  Denmark,  the  son  of  im- 
ported Hedgford,  I  have  taken  some  pains  to  examine  his  pedi- 
gree. His  sire  was  thoroughbred,  his  dam  and  grandam  were 


THE    AMERICAN   SADDLE    HORSE.  195 

mongrels,  and  the  remoter  crosses  were  impossible  fictions.  The 
fact  that  he  ran  four  miles  cuts  no  figure  as  evidence  of  purity 
of  blood,  for  horses  were  running  four  miles  in  this  country  be- 
fore the  first  "thoroughbred"  was  born.  Of  the  fourteen  stallions 
that  are  inserted  as  "Foundation  Stock/'  it  is  unfortunate  that 
the  choice  seems  to  be  practically  restricted  to  the  State  of  Ken- 
tucky, while  the  States  of  Ohio,  Indiana,  and  Tennessee,  to  say 
nothing  of  Illinois,  Missouri,  etc.,  have  produced  numbers  of 
families  and  tribes  that  are  much  more  prominent  and  valuable 
from  the  true  saddle-horse  standpoint  than  some  that  appear  in 
the  select  list  of  fourteen.  It  is  doubtless  true,  however,  that 
more  attention  has  been  paid  to  symmetry  and  style,  and  to  the 
correct  development  and  culture  of  the  true  saddle  gaits,  in 
Kentucky  than  in  any  of  the  other  States.  With  such  horses  as 
Games'  Denmark,  John  Dillard,  Tom  Hal,  Brinker's  Drennon, 
Texas,  Peters'  Halcorn,  and  Copperbottom  the  list  is  all  right, 
but  the  other  half-dozen  are  mostly  young  and  have  hardly  been 
heard  of  outside  of  their  own  immediate  neighborhoods.  It  is  a 
notable  fact  that '  old  Pacing  Pilot  does  not  appear  as  the  pro- 
genitor of  a  saddle  family. 

In  considering  the  comparative  merits  of  the  leading  founda- 
tion stallions  we  find  that  Denmark  was  not  a  success  in  any 
direction  except  as  the  sire  of  handsome  and  stylish  saddle 
horses.  John  Dillard  may  not  have  been  the  equal  of  Denmark 
in  the  elegance  of  his  progeny,  but  he  far  surpassed  him  in  his 
valuable  .relations  to  the  trotter.  His  daughters  became  quite 
famous  as  the  producers  of  trotters  of  a  high  order,  and  they  have 
over  twenty  in  the  2:30  list.  The  Tom  Hals  have  developed 
phenomenal  speed  at  the  pace,  and  a  great  deal  of  it,  interspersed 
with  but  few  trotters. 

Of  late  years  many  owners  of  the  very  best  material  for  saddle 
stock  have  given  their  whole  attention  to  the  development  of 
speed,  either  at  the  lateral  or  diagonal  motion,  because  it  has 
been  deemed  more  profitable.  In  thus  selecting,  breeding  and 
developing  for  extreme  speed,  the  adaptation  to  saddle  purposes 
has  been  lost  or  bred  out.  While  it  is  true  that  some  colts  come 
into  the  world  endowed  with  all  the  saddle  gaits,  it  is  also  true 
that  skill  and  patience  are  requisite  in  teaching  the  saddle  horse 
good  manners.  There  is  no  imaginable  use  to  which  the  horse 
can  be  put  where  he  will  show  his  beautiful  form  and  thorough 
education  to  so  great  advantage  as  under  the  saddle. 


CHAPTER    XVI. 

THE  WILD  HORSES  OF  AMERICA. 

The  romances  of  fifty  7ears  ago — Was  the  horse  indigenous  to  this  country? — 
The  theories  of  the  paleontologists  not  satisfactory — Pedigrees  of  over  two- 
millions  of  years  too  long — Outlines  of  horses  on  prehistoric  ruins  evi- 
dently modern — The  linguistic  test  among  the  oldest  tribes  of  Indians  fails 
to  discover  any  word  for  "Horse" — The  horses  abandoned  west  of  the 
Mississippi  by  the  followers  of  De  Spto  about  1541  were  the  progenitors  of 
the  wild  horses  of  the  plains. 

FIFTY  years  ago  there  was  much  that  was  romantic  and  mys- 
terious in  our  conceptions  of  the  real  character  and  origin  of  the 
vast  herds  of  wild  horses  that  abounded  on  our  Western  plains,  and 
the  same  remark  applies  to  their  congeners  on  the  pampas  of 
South  America.  The  wild  horse  and  the  Indian  opened  up  a 
most  inviting  field  for  the  writers  of  romance,  and  current  litera- 
ture was  flooded  with  "Wild  Western"  stories,  with  the  horse  and 
the  Indian  as  the  leading  characters.  We  are  now  one  genera- 
tion, at  least,  this  side  of  the  time  when  stories  of  this  kind  are 
either  sought  or  read,  but  we  are  not  past  the  period  when  the 
origin  or  introduction  of  the  horse  on  this  continent  may  be  con- 
sidered with  interest  and  profit.  Before  touching  upon  the  wild 
horse,  as  known  in  our  early  history,  however,  it  may  be  well  to- 
consider,  briefly,  the  question  as  to  whether  he  may  not  have 
been  indigenous  to  this  continent. 

In  our  generation  the  spade  has  become  a  wonderful  developer 
of  the  truths  of  ancient  history.  The  buried  and  forgotten  cities. 
of  the  old  world  are  being  unearthed  in  Europe,  Asia  and  Africa, 
and  thousands  of  works  of  art  and  learning  that  had  vanished 
from  the  face  of  the  earth  are  again  restored  to  the  knowledge 
of  the  human  race.  In  a  kindred  branch  of  investigation  the 
geologists  and  paleontologists  have  been  delving  into  the  bowels- 
of  the  earth — not  to  find  what  previous  generations  of  men  had 
left  behind  them,  but  to  find  what  life  was  myriads  of  ages  before 
man  was  placed  on  the  earth.  Out  of  the  rocks  they  have,, 


THE    WILD    HORSES   OF   AMERICA.  197 

literally,  quarried  many  strange  examples  of  animal  life  that 
liave  been  buried  millions  of  years,  and  hundreds  of  feet  below 
the  present  surface.  Among  these  strange  petrefactions  that 
were  thus  buried  when  the  earth  was  young,  there  is  one  that  has 
been  widely  exploited  as  the  "Primal  Horse,"  that  is,  the  animal 
from  which  our  present  horse  was  finally  evolved.  There  are 
three  or  four  specimens  of  this  petref action  now  on  exhibition  in 
this  country,  the  first  having  been  discovered  by  Professor  Marsh, 
of  Yale  College,  and  now  in  the  museum  of  that  institution. 
Nearly  twenty  years  ago  Professor  Huxley,  the  great  English 
naturalist,  delivered  a  lecture  in  this  city  on  the  Marsh  petrefac- 
tion  as  his  text,  in  which  he  told  us  that  the  "Primal  Horse" 
had,  originally,  five  toes  on  each  foot,  that  after  an  indeterminate 
geological  period  he  lost  the  two  outside  toes  on  the  hind  feet, 
und  after  another  million  years,  more  or  less,  he  lost  the  outside 
toes  of  the  fore  feet,  thus  leaving  him  ready  to  go  on  developing 
the  middle  toe  into  the  foot  and  hoof  of  the  horse  while  the  out- 
side toes  disappeared.  In  proof  of  this  he  offered  the  fact  that 
horses  of  this  day  have  splint  bones  on  each  side  of  the  leg, 
under  the  knee,  and  these  bones  are  the  remnants  of  the  outside 
toes.  This  was  the  explanation  which  the  learned  professor  gave 
in  disposing  of  the  outside  toes  when  there  were  but  three  toes 
on  each  foot,  but  he  failed  to  explain  what  had  become  of  the 
outside  toes  when  there  were  five  on  each  foot,  and  there  his 
whole  explanation  toppled  to  the  ground. 

In  the  American  Museum  of  Natural  History,  in  this  city,  there 
is  a  very  fine  representative  of  this  particular  type  of  petrefac- 
tions. It  is  about  fifteen  inches  high,  with  a  head  that  is  dis- 
proportionately large,  and  a  tail  that  is  long  and  slender,  sug- 
gesting that  of  a  leopard.  On  each  fore  foot  this  animal  has  four 
toes,  or  claws,  as  we  might  call  them,  and  on  each  hind  foot 
three  claws.  With  these  claws  this  little  .animal  might  dig  in 
the  ground,  or  he  might  climb  a  tree  when  necessary  for  either 
safety  or  food.  Each  one  of  these  toes  nas  its  own  distinct 
column  of  joints  and  bone  extending  to  the  knee,  and  there  is  no 
material  difference  in  the  size  and  strength  of  these  different 
columns.  Now,  with  three  toes  and  three  columns  only,  we  can 
accept  or  reject,  as  we  please,  Professor  Huxley's  method  of  get- 
ting the  two  superfluous  ones  out  of  sight  by  pointing  to  the 
splint  bones  on  the  leg  of  a  modern  horse  and  saying  these  are 
the  remnants  of  the  outside  toes.  But,  in  the  meantime,  neither 


198  THE    HOUSE    OF    AMERICA. 

Mr.  Huxley  nor  anybody  else  has  told  us  what  became  of  the- 
outside  toes  and  their  columns  in  cases  where  there  were  five 
toes.  It  will  not  do  to  chuck  these  out  of  sight  and  say  nothing 
about  them;  they  must  be  accounted  for  or  the  theory  fails.  In 
the  specimen  now  under  examination  the  fore  feet  are  each  sup- 
plied with  four  toes,  and  each  toe  is  supported  by  its  own  distinct 
column  of  bone.  Here  we  meet  with  the  same  difficulty  as  in 
the  case  of  five  toes,  for  we  have  more  material  than  the  Huxley 
theory  is  able  to  provide  for.  This  theory  has  been  generally 
accepted  among  specialists,  in  this  line  of  investigation,  and  they 
all  point  to  the  splint  bones,  as  already  stated,  as  the  remnants 
of  the  two  toes,  adhering  to  the  main  column.  This  leaves  the 
one  superfluous  toe  wholly  unprovided  for,  and  thus  the  theory 
discredits  itself  and  leaves  the  question  in  a  shape  that  is  entirely 
unsatisfactory  and  unacceptable  to  the  understanding. 

The  teeth  of  this  specimen,  in  their  shape  and  arrangement, 
very  strongly  resemble  the  teeth  of  the  horse.  Upon  this  one 
fact  is  placed  the  chief  reliance  to  sustain  the  claim  that  this  was 
the  "Primal  Horse,"  but  this  fact,  when  taken  without  the  sup- 
port of  other  facts,  simply  proves  that  the  animal  was  herbivor- 
ous, subsisting  on  the  same  kind  of  food  as  the  horse,  but  it  does- 
not  prove  that  he  was  a  horse.  The  teeth  are  an  excellent  start- 
ing point,  and  we  admit  their  arrangement  and  resemblance  to 
the  teeth  of  the  horse,  but  the  rules  of  comparative  anatomy,  as 
well  as  common  sense,  require  that  at  some  other  point  or  points, 
there  should  be  at  least  a  suggestion  of  resemblance.  In  this 
case  there  is  absolutely  no  resemblance,  but  a  very  marked  and 
unmistakable  divergence.  The  foot  of  this  little  animal,  fifteen 
inches  high,  bears  no  more  resemblance  to  the  foot  of  the  horse 
than  the  foot  of  the  dog  bears  to  the  foot  of  the  horse.  Indeed, 
the  foot  of  the  specimen  before  us,  whether  provided  with  three, 
four  or  five  claws,  very  strikingly  resembles  the  foot  of  the  dog. 
The  arrangement  of  the  different  specimens  of  the  feet,  commenc- 
ing with  the  smallest  with  four  toes  and  ending  with  the  perfect 
and  full-grown  foot  of  the  horse  as  we  know  him,  intended  to 
illustrate  the  process  of  evolution,  is  a  very  interesting  study,  but 
when  you  have  done  with  the  last  foot  with  claws  and  reach  for- 
ward for  the  first  foot  with  a  hoof,  you  find  there  is  an  impassable 
gulf  between  them,  over  which  the  theory  of  Evolution  has  not 
been  able  to  construct  a  bridge.  But  there  is  another  considera- 
tion that  is  final  and*  that  cannot  be  overcome  by  any  theory 


THE    \VILD    HORSES    OF    AMERICA.  199 

whatever.  According  to  the  chronology  widely  accepted  among 
geologists,  this  little  animal  was  buried  in  the  sand  more  than 
two  millions  of  years  ago,  and  in  a  grave  more  than  a  hundred 
feet  below  the  general  surface  of  the  country  in  which  he  was 
found.  In  some  great  upheaval  or  cataclysm  of  the  earth's  sur- 
face, this  little  animal,  with  all  his  contemporaries,  perished,  and 
there  perished  with  him  all  possibility  of  propagating  his  race. 
It  is  only  a  waste  of  time,  therefore,  to  speculate  upon  what  a 
certain  race  of  animals  might  have  produced  in  our  day,  when 
they  were  all  cut  off  two  millions  of  years  ago.  With  this  dis- 
position of  the  little  animal  with  the  variety  of  toes,  quarried 
from  the  rocks  and  by  courtesy  here  called  the  "Primal  Horse," 
we  reach  another  prehistoric  epoch  in  our  inquiry,  but  much 
less  remote  than  the  one  just  considered. 

From  the  incredible  numbers  of  wild  horses  on  our  Western 
plains  and  on  the  pampas  of  South  America,  at  a  very  early 
poriod  in  history,  it  became  a  question  of  some  interest  with 
many  thinking  men  as  to  whether  the  horse  was  not  indigenous 
on  this  continent.  It  is  within  the  knowledge  of  everybody  that 
this  continent  was  inhabited  by  a  mysterious  and  unknown  race 
of  people  long  before  it  was  visited  by  Europeans.  These  mys- 
terious people  seem  to  have  been  driven  out  by  the  fierce  and 
warlike  savages  who  occuplied  the  country  at  the  time  of  its  dis- 
covery, and  even  they  knew  nothing  about  the  people  who  had 
preceded  them.  In  very  many  localities  the  vanished  people  left 
behind  them  marks,  numerous  and  unmistakable,  that  they  had 
made  considerable  progress  in  the  arts  of  civilized  life.  Writers 
have  generally  designated  them  as  "the  Mound  Builders,"  be- 
cause bhey  heaped  great  tumuli  of  earth  over  the  graves  of  their 
distinguished  dead,  but  the  real  "Mound  Builders"  did  far  more 
than  this,  for  with  immense  labor  they  built  great,  strong  de- 
fenses for  their  protection  against  their  enemies.  When  we  go 
further  West  and  South,  into  the  fertile  valleys  among  the  moun  • 
tains,  we  find  still  later  traces  of  these  unknown  people  in  the 
ruins  of  buildings  and  dwellings  erected,  with  infinite  labor, 
traces  of  irrigating  canals,  etc.,  but  we  still  fail  to  come  up  with 
them,  or  any  trace  of  their  history.  In  that  region  ruins  of  this 
type  are  designated  as  "Aztec  Ruins,"  but  this  title  puts  us  no 
further  on  the  way  of  who  the  builders  were.  In  1877  a  corre- 
spondent of  a  Colorado  newspaper,  who  seemed  to  write  intelli- 
gently and  candidly,  described  some  of  those  ruins  which  he 


200  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

found  in  the  valley  of  the  Las  Animas,  in  Southwestern  Colorado. 
He  speaks  of  a  valley  fifteen  miles  long  and  seven  miles  wide,  on 
the  Animas  River,  and  says  this  valley  was  covered  with  dwellings 
built  of  stone,  but  he  gives  particular  attention  to  a  row  of  build- 
ings built  of  sandstone  laid  in  adobe  mud.  These  buildings  are 
about  three  hundred  feet  long  and  three  hundred  feet  apart,  as 
I  understand  the  writer,  and  extend  a  distance  of  six  thousand 
feet.  The  outside  walls  are  four  feet  thick  and  the  inside  ones 
from  one  and  a  half  to  three  feet  thick;  there  are  rooms  still  left 
and  walls  remaining  that  indicate  a  building  four  stories  high. 
In  some  of  the  rooms  there  are  writings  that  never  have  been 
deciphered,  and  iu  one  of  them  there  are  drawings  of  tarantulas, 
centipedes,  horses  and  men.  The  word  "horses"  riveted  my  at- 
tention, and  connected  with  it  there  were  several  things  to  be 
considered.  First,  were  the  drawings  really  intended  to  represent 
horses?  Second,  if  so  might  they  not  have  been  placed  there  long 
after  the  builders  had  disappeared  and  in  recent  years?  Third,  if 
placed  there  by  the  builders,  what  was  their  date,  and  were  they 
before  or  after  the  introduction  of  the  horse  into  Mexico  by  the 
Spaniards?  The  possibility  of  ever  obtaining  any  satisfactory 
information  about  these  drawings  and  their  date  seemed  very 
remote,  but  after  watching  and  waiting  for  about  eighteen  years, 
I  have  recently  received  two  letters  that  settle  the  whole  matter 
so  far  as  these  particular  ruins  are  concerned. 

Mr.  Charles  McLoyd,  a  very  intelligent  gentleman  of  Durango, 
Colorado,  who  has  made  a  special  study  of  the  Cliff  Dwellers  and 
kindred  subjects,  in  that  part  of  the  world,  writing  under  date 
of  January  10,  1895,  says: 

"  I  am  unable  to  inform  you  in  regard  to  the  pictures  on  those  particular 
ruins,  but  can  say  that  in  no  other  locality  have  1  found  pictures  of  horses  or 
anything  to  indicate  that  these  prehistoric  races  had  any  knowledge  of  the 
animal.  If  such  pictures  existed  we  would  be  unable  to  determine  anything 
definite  from  them;  or  in  other  words,  it  would  not  show  that  the  horse  was 
on  this  continent  before  the  Spaniards  brought  him,  but  rather  that  the  people 
who  constructed  the  buildings  lived  here  after  the  Spaniards  came.  I  have 
often  seen  pictures  of  horses  on  the  walls  of  canons,  but  there  is  no  question 
but  they  were  the  work  of  the  present  Indians.  We  often  find  associated  with 
them  pictures  of  railroad  trains,  etc.,  that  indicate  that  some  of  them  are  of 
very  recent  date.  To  sum  the  matter  up,  would  say  that,  so  far,  there  is  no 
evidence  that  these  races  had  any  knowledge  of  the  horse,  or  had  ever  seen 
the  Spaniards." 

Mr.   John  A.   Koontz,  of  Aztec,   New  Mexico,  writes  under 


THE    WILD    HORSES    OF    AMERICA.  201 

date  of  January  24,  1895.  He  knows  all  about  the  ruins  in  ques- 
tion, for  he  owns  the  land  on  which  they  are  situated,  and  puts 
the  whole  matter  very  clearly,  as  follows: 

"  I  know  nothing  of  the  drawings  of  horses  and  other  animals  on  the  walls 
of  the  '  Aztec  Ruins '  here  that  Mr.  Wallace  speaks  of.  I  think  the  drawings 
were  all  in  the  imagination  of  the  correspondent  to  whom  Mr.  Wallace  refers. 
I  have  been  familiar  with  the  ruins  for  fourteen  years  and  this  is  the  first  time 
I  have  ever  heard  of  any  drawings  of  horses  on  any  of  the  walls.  There  are 
drawings  on  some  rocks  some  miles  from  the  ruins,  hut  from  their  nature  I 
have  considered  them  the  work  of  the  modern  Indians.  These  ruins  were 
visited  by  a  party  of  archeologists  two  years  ago,  who  spent  several  weeks 
here,  and  made  a  survey,  with  maps  and  general  drawings  of  ihe  same.  They 
decided  that  the  main  building  had,  originally,  over  seven  hundred  rooms." 

These  letters  are  conclusive,  so  far  as  the  region  of  the  Las 
Animas  is  concerned,  and  with  that  region  knocked  out  there  is 
not  enough  left  to  justify  further  search  for  evidence  that  the 
prehistoric  races  had  any  knowledge  of  the  horse.  Nothing  re- 
mained then  but  the  linguistic  test,  and  in  1885  I  had  such  an 
opportunity  for  applying  this  test  as  may  never  occur  again. 
This  test  formulated  itself  in  my  mind,  in  this  shape:  "Did  any 
of  the  nations  or  tribes  of  the  aboriginal  inhabitants  of  this  con- 
tinent have  a  word  in  their  language  indicating  a  horse?" 
When  in  California  I  applied  to  Mr.  Bancroft,  the  compiler  and 
publisher  of  the  great  documentary  history  of  the  Pacific  coast, 
who  then  had  a  large  corps  of  skilled  translators  at  work  on  his 
famous  compilation,  and  submitted  my  question.  He  introduced 
me  to  his  principal  linguist,  who  knew  not  only  Spanish,  Eng- 
lish and  other  modern  languages,  but  also  the  language  of  the 
Indians  of  the  coast,  the  mountains  and  the  plains,  of  the  period 
covered  by  the  question.  The  question  did  not  seem  to  be  new 
to  him,  and  he  answered  with  the  candor  and  conscientiousness 
of  a  man  who  knew  what  he  was  saying,  that  there  was  no  word  in 
any  of  the  Indian  tongues,  ancient  or  modern,  that  represented 
the  horse.  This  settled  the  question  of  the  supposed  prehistoric 
character  and  rank  of  the  horse,  and  we  are  thus  driven  to  accept 
the  infinitesimally  small  number  left  behind  by  Cortez,  Nunez 
and  De  Soto  as  the  seed  from  which  sprang  the  countless  thou- 
sands of  wild  horses  that  for  generations  roamed  the  Western 
plains. 

The  story  of  the  Conquest  of  Mexico  is  full  of  blood  and 
cruelty,  but  as  we  have  nothing  to  do  with  any  part  of  the  story 


202  THE   HOESE   OF   AMERICA. 

except  so  much  of  it  as  relates  to  the  introduction  of  the  horse  to 
the  continent  of  North  America,  it  will  require  but  small  space 
to  tell  it.  Cortez  sailed  from  Cuba  for  Yucatan,  Feburary,  1519, 
with  an  army  of  six  hundred  and  sixty-three  men,  two  hundred 
Indians  and  sixteen  horses.  This  wholly  inadequate  supply  of 
cavalry  was  the  weak  place  in  his  venture,  but  the  horses  could 
not  be  had  in  Cuba,  without  paying  an  incredible  price.  Those 
he  was  able  to  secure  cost  from  four  to  five  hundred  pesos  de  oro 
each.  The  peso  was  the  Spanish  dollar.  The  expedition  was 
nominally  fitted  out  for  Yucatan,  but  its  real  aim  was  the  heart 
of  Mexico.  In  his  first  fight  with  the  Indians  near  the  coast, 
men  mounted  on  horses  were  feared  by  the  natives  as  monstrous 
apparitions.  This  overwhelming  fear  of  the  horse  may  seem  to 
some  of  my  readers  as  overdone  by  the  historian,  but  it  seems  to 
have  been  the  common  experience  of  all  the  different  nations  and 
tribes  of  Indians  wherever  the  horse  made  his  first  appearance  in 
battle.  In  the  first  battle  two  of  the  horses  were  killed,  and  in 
the  second  another  was  killed,  and  all  that  remained  were  more 
or  less  severely  wounded.  Cortez  was  afterward  joined  by  Alva- 
rado,  at  VeraCruz,  with  twenty  horses  and  one  hundred  and  fifty 
men.  In  making  his  official  reports  directly  to  the  home  govern- 
ment in  Spain  instead  of  the  governor  of  Cuba,  Cortez  gave  mor- 
tal offense  to  that  dignitary,  and  he  sent  out  an  armada  under 
Karvaez  to  supersede  Cortez  and  return  him  in  chains  to  Cuba. 
This  armada  consisted  of  eighteen  vessels,  carrying  nine  hundred 
men,  eighty  of  whom  were  cavalry.  After  some  diplomacy, 
Cortez,  feeling  that  with  his  little  handful  of  men  he  was  wholly 
unable  to  meet  Narvaez,  he  did  all  he  could  to  avoid  a  conflict. 
Each  party  knew  the  exact  strength  of  the  other,  and  as  Narvaez 
began  to  threaten,  Cortez  determined  to  fight  for  his  rights  and 
his  liberty.  He  then  had  but  five  men  mounted,  but  he  took  ad- 
vantage of  the  carelessness  of  his  adversary,  made  a  night  attack 
in  the  midst  of  a  tempest,  and  captured  Narvaez  and  his  whole 
army.  The  private  soldiers  of  that  day,  like  their  commanders, 
had  no  idea  or  principle  to  right  for  except  for  plunder,  and  they 
were  always  ready  to  attach  themselves  to  the  most  successful 
robber.  Cortez  was  their  ideal  leader,  and  at  once  he  had  a  new 
army  of  devoted  followers.  He  then  had  eighty-five  mounted 
men,  and  he  felt  strong  enough  to  hold  and  rule  the  great  coun- 
try he  had  conquered.  Mexico  was  conquered  in  152 1, .and  the 
news  of  the  vast  amount  of  treasure  captured  brought  a  great 


THE   WILD   HOUSES   OF   AMERICAc  203 

-crowd  of  emigrants  from  Spain  and  from  all  her  dominions.  The 
Spaniards,  like  other  nations  of  Southern  Europe,  kept  their  horses 
entire  and  whenever  representatives  of  both  sexes  strayed  away, 
reproduction  would  follow.  As  the  country  became  more  tranquil, 
and  as  the  tide  of  European  settlers  kept  pouring  in,  we  can  easily 
understand  how  the  little  bands  of  estrays  should  grow  into  larger 
bands  and  soon  become  as  wild  as  though  they  had  never  seen  a 
human  being  except  to  flee  from  him. 

The  explorer  De  Soto  sailed  for  Florida  in  1539,  in  search  of 
gold.  He  had  in  his  command  five  hundred  and  thirteen  men, 
exclusive  of  sailors,  and  two  hundred  and  thirty-seven  horses, 
besides  some  for  the  purpose  of  bearing  burdens,  the  number 
not  given.  In  all  his  weary  journey  of  three  years  he  found  the 
Indians  active,  hostile,  and  courageous  fighters.  In  one  of  his 
first  battles  he  lost  twelve  horses,  and  had  seventy  wounded.  He 
pursued  many  phantoms  in  search  of  gold,  in  different  directions, 
but  his  general  course  was  westward  and  northwestward.  He 
wras  the  first  European  to  discover  the  Mississippi  Eiver,  not  far 
from  the  mouth  of  the  Arkansas,  and  there  he  was  buried  in  the 
middle  of  the  river,  to  prevent  the  Indians  from  discovering  he 
was  dead  and  from  desecrating  his  remains.  His  followers  then 
determined  to  push  on  westward  to  Mexico,  and  reached  as  far  as 
the  borders  of  Texas,  probably,  when  they  became  discouraged 
with  the  magnitude  of  the  difficulties  that  surrounded  them,  and 
determined  to  return  and  seek  an  outlet  from  the  wilderness  by 
water.  On  this  last  journey,  west  of  the  Mississippi,  they  suf- 
fered their  greatest  loss  of  horses.  They  had  not  been  shod  for 
more  than  a  year,  and  a  great  many  were  lame  and  unable  to 
travel.  When  the  Spaniards  had  completed  their  boats  and  were 
ready  to  leave  the  scenes  of  their  sufferings  and  disasters,  they 
turned  loose  upon  the  bank  of  the  river  their  four  or  five  remain- 
ing horses,  which  manifested  great  excitement,  running  up  and 
down  the  bank  neighing  for  their  masters,  as  they  sailed  away. 
This  alarmed  the  Indians  and  they  ran  into  the  water  for  safety. 

The  Indians  were  afraid  of  the  horses  and  the  horses  were 
afraid  of  the  Indians.  It  seems  to  be  a  fact,  observed  in  all  the 
early  intercourse  of  the  Spaniards  with  the  Indians,  that  uni- 
versally they  had  a  kind  of  superstitious  awe  of  the  horse  as  a 
superior  being,  and  it  is  probably  due  to  this  awe  that  the  Indians 
did  not  utterly  destroy  every  horse  that  fell  out  of  the  ranks  or 
that  escaped  in  the  wilderness.  As  I  understand  the  history  of 


204  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

this  terrible  exploration,  when  the  Spaniards  crossed  the  Missis- 
sippi they  had  two  hundred  and  fifty  men  and  one  hundred  and 
fifty  horses,  and  when  they  came  back  and  were  ready  to  sail 
they  had  but  four  or  five  horses  left.  It  is  fair,  therefore,  to 
conclude  that  the  greater  portion  of  these  hundred  and  fifty  head 
was  scattered  in  the  wilderness  as  they  went  out  and  as  they  re- 
turned. This  provides  a  sufficient  breeding  basis  for  the  count- 
less multitudes  of  descendants,  and  places  that  nucleus  in  the 
right  region  to  nourish  them  in  a  feral  state. 

While  this  exploration  of  De  Soto  seems  to  furnish  a  breeding 
basis  of  sufficient  breadth  to  account  for  all  the  wild  horses  that 
have  appeared  on  this  continent,  there  is  another  consideration 
that  we  must  not  overlook,  and  that  is  the  inborn  tendency  of 
the  domestic  horse  to  become  wild  when  in  wild  associations. 
By  turning  to  the  chapter  on  the  colony  of  Virginia  you  will  see 
that  there  were  many  wild  horses  there  at  the  beginning  of  the 
last  century.  On  the  frontiers,  near  the  habitat  of  wild  horses, 
they  became  a  great  nuisance  to  the  settlers  in  "coaxing"  away 
their  domestic  horses  and  making  them  as  wild  as  the  wildest. 
These  accretions  to  their  strength  from  the  domestic  horse  have 
been  going  on  for  generations,  and  thus  the  wild  horse  became 
conglomerate  in  the  elements  of  his  blood,  with  the  Spanish 
traits  still  predominant.  Fifty  or  a  hundred  years  ago  the  pens- 
of  many  writers  were  employed  in  idealizing  "The  Wild  Horse  of 
the  Desert."  He  was  made  the  leading  figure  in  many  a  romance, 
and  the  hero  of  many  a  triumph.  Tom  Thumb,  the  great  trot- 
ter that  was  taken  to  England,  astonished  all  the  world  with  his. 
speed  and  his  endurance,  and,  following  the  fashion  of  the  day, 
he  was  represented  to  have  been  caught  wild  on  the  Western 
plains.  For  many  years  the  wild  horse  was  the  "fad"  of  Ameri- 
can writers,  just  as  the  Arabian  was  of  English  writers,  and  the 
writers  on  one  side  were  just  about  as  far  from  intelligence  and 
truth  as  those  on  the  other.  When,  forty  years  ago,  great  droves 
of  the  half-breeds,  Mustangs,  were  brought  from  the  plains  to 
the  border  prairie  States,  seeking  a  market,  the  scales  began  to 
drop  from  the  eyes  of  the  worshipers  of  the  wild  horse.  They 
were  homely  little  brutes,  and  they  were  as  tough  as  whit-leather. 
But  the  countless  multitudes  that  roamed  at  will  over  their 
grazing  grounds,  making  the  earth  tremble  when  they  moved, 
have  dwindled  down  to  a  few  insignificant  bands,  and  the  whole 
glamour  around  the  wild  horse  of  the  desert  has  vanished. 


CHAPTER  XVII. 

MESSENGER   AND   HIS   ANCESTORS. 

Messenger  the  greatest  of  all  trotting  progenitors — Record  of  pedigrees  in  Eng- 
lish Stud  Book — Pedigrees  made  from  unreliable  sources — Messenger's  right 
male  line  examined — Flying  Guilders'  "mile  in  a  minute" — Blaze  short 
of  being  thoroughbred — Sampson,  a  good  race  horse — His  size;  short  in 
his  breeding — Engineer  short  also — Mauibrino  was  a  race  horse  with  at 
least  two  pacing  crosses;  distinguished  only  as  a  progenitor  of  coach 
horses  and  fast  trotters — Messenger's  dam  cannot  be  traced  nor  identified — 
Among  all  the  horses  claiming  to  be  thoroughbred  he  is  the  only  one  that 
founded  a  family  of  trotters — This  fact  conceded  by  eminent  writers  in 
attempting  to  find  others. 

HAVING  completed  a  brief  historical  sketch  of  horse  history 
from  the  beginning,  and  many  events  connected  therewith,  we 
are  now  ready  to  consider  the  American  Trotting  Horse,  as  the 
culmination  of  what  has  been  written.  Thus  far  we  have  met 
with  much  pretentious  nonsense,  claiming  to  be  history  and 
written  by  men  who  never  gave  the  subject  the  study  of  an 
honest  hour.  The  horse  is  honest  enough,  but  the  rule  seems 
to  be  almost  universal  that  whenever  men  commence  to  write 
about  him  they  are  guided  by  their  imagination  and  not  by  the 
facts.  As  to  what  we  are  to  meet  in  the  coming  chapters,  I  can 
only  say  that,  unfortunately,  "the  fathers  have  eaten  sour  grapes 
and  the  children's  teeth  are  set  on  edge."  The  instinct  to  mis- 
represent has  been  transmitted,  and  I  cannot  promise  that  we 
will  find  any  great  moral  improvement  among  the  horsemen  of 
our  own  country  and  generation. 

For  more  than  three-quarters  of  a  century,  and  indeed  from 
the  first  trotting  experiences  of  this  country  that  have  been  pre- 
served, it  has  been  the  unanimous  judgment  of  all  who  have 
given  any  thought  or  attention  to  the  subject  that  the  imported 
English  horse,  Messenger,  was  the  great  central  source  of  trot- 
ting speed.  As  the  years  have  rolled  by  this  opinion  has 
increased  in  strength  until  it  has  become  an  intelligent  and 
demonstrated  belief.  When,  forty  years  ago,  a  horse  was  found 


206  THE   HOESE   OF  AMEEICA. 

able  to  trot  a  mile  in  two  minutes  and  thirty  seconds,  the  speed 
was  deemed  wholly  phenomenal,  but  that  speed  has  been  in- 
creased, second  by  second,  until  we  are  now  on  the  very  brink  of 
two  minutes.  In  this  process  every  second  and  fraction  of  a 
second  that  has  been  cut  off  has  been  so  much  additonal  proof  of 
the  universal  belief  that  Messenger  was  the  chief  progenitor  of 
the  American  trotter.  He  is  not  the  only  source  of  trotting 
speed,  but  he  is  the  chief  source.  Whence  he  derived  this  dis- 
tinctive power  to  transmit  trotting  speed  will  be  made  more 
clear  as  we  proceed.  His  blood  left  no  deep  nor  lasting  impress 
upon  the  running  horses  of  the  country,  and  it  is  seldom 
we  meet  with  any  trace  of  it  in  the  running  horse  of  to-day,  but 
it  is  prominent  and  conspicuous  at  the  winning  post  of  every 
trotting  track  on  this  continent.  This  will  be  made  apparent 
when  we  come  to  consider  the  details  and  the  merits  of  the 
mighty  tribes  and  families  that  have  descended  from  him. 

Several  years  ago  I  promised  to  write  a  volume  on  "Messenger 
and  his  Descendants,"  and  I  have  often  been  reminded  of  that 
unfulfilled  promise,  which  I  will  here  try  to  rsdeem.  When  that 
promise  was  made  I  had  written  many  things  about  Messenger, 
but  since  then  I  have  secured  very  many  valuable  facts  that,  I 
think,  will  far  more  than  compensate  for  the  delay.  There  is 
still  much  that  is  unknown  and  much  that  is  only  partially 
known  of  the  origin  and  history  of  Messenger  and  his  ancestors, 
and  in  considering  the  questions  that  will  arise  as  the  discussion 
progresses,  I  will  not  submit  to  a  slavish  acceptance  of  what- 
ever has  come  down  in  the  shape  of  stallion  advertisements,  or  as 
unsupported  traditions,  and  then  recorded  as  facts  by  people  who 
knew  nothing  about  them,  and  made  no  effort  to  know.  I  shall 
look  for  the  facts  that  are  known  to  be  facts,  or  such  evidence  as 
is  reasonable  and  commends  itself  to  an  unbiased  judgment,  and 
then  reach  such  conclusions  as  right  reason  shall  dictate.  The 
pedigree  of  Messenger,  or  rather  the  pedigree  of  Messenger's 
reputed  grandam,  appears  in  the  English  Stud  Book  in  the 
editions  of  1803  and  1827,  in  the  following  form: 

MARE  (Sister  to  Figurante).     Her  dam  by  Starling,  out  of  Snap's 
dam. 

1769,  b.  f.  by  Herod  (dam  of  Alert).  )  M     Vernon 

1770,  bl.  c.  Hyacinth,  by  Turf.         f  Mr>  Vernon- 

1771,  bl.  c.  Leviathan  (aft.  Mungo),  by  Marske.     Lord  Abingdon. 


AIESSENGEB  AND   HIS   ANCESTORS.  207 

1773,  —  f.  by  Turf.  1 

}$: «.  ff.  fe  D"*. (dam  of  "^"^    L<- «— 

1780,  b.  f.  by  Justice  (dam  of  Equity).     } 

1782,  b.  c.   Vulcan,  by  Justice.     Mr.  Pan  ton. 

1783.  b.  c.  Favfige,  by  Sweetbriar.  ) 

1784  b.  f.  Ariel  by  Highflyer  (dam  of  Mr.     \  Mr.  Bullock. 
Hamilton's  Swindler,  by  Bagot).  ) 

This  is  all  we  have  of  the  pedigree  of  Messenger  as  recorded  in 
the  English  Stud  Book,  and  this  record,  on  its  face,  has  a  very 
suspicious  appearance.  Messenger  had  run  some  races  at  New- 
market and  a  place  must  be  provided  for  him  in  the  Stud  Book. 
He  always  ran  as  a  son  of  Mambrino,  and  there  is  no  doubt  this 
is  correct,  as  it  so  appeared  in  the  Racing  Calendar,  long  before 
the  days  of  the  Stud  Book.  But  nobody,  either  then  or  later, 
seemed  to  know  anything  about  his  dam.  Toward  the  close  of 
this  chapter  I  will  give  an  exhaustive  review  of  the  many  troubles 
in  which  these  two  fillies  by  Turf  seem  to  be  involved. 

Messenger  was  by  Mambrino,  he  by  Engineer,  he  by  Sampson, 
he  by  Blaze,  he  by  Flying  Childers,  and  he  by  the  Darley  Ara- 
bian. We  give  the  right  male  line  here  for  the  reason  that  there 
can  be  no  doubt  as  to  the  accuracy  of  this  line,  for  it  has  been 
preserved  in  contemporaneous  racing  records.  The  trouble,  where 
any  trouble  exists,  is  all  with  the  dams  of  these  horses  which  at 
best  are  only  matters  of  the  most  uncertain  tradition.  A  writer 
in  the  Edinburgh  Review  for  July,  1864,  covers  the  whole  ground 
when  he  says:  "The  early  pedigrees  (in  the  Stud  Book)  are  but 
little  to  be  relied  upon,  as  they  seem  for  the  most  part  to  have 
been  taken  from  traditional  accounts  in  the  stable,  from  descrip- 
tions at  the  back  of  old  pictures,  and  from  advertisements,  none 
of  which  had  to  pass  muster  at  the  Herald's  College."  This  is 
in  full  accordance  with  our  American  experiences  and  it  is  en- 
tirely safe  to  say  that  the  great  body  of  our  old  American  pedi- 
grees, especially  in  their  remote  extensions,  are  more  or  less  ficti- 
tious. The  industry  of  producing  great  pedigrees  out  of  little 
or  nothing  has  long  been  pursued  on  both  sides  of  the  water,  and 
it  would  be  very  difficult  to  determine  which  side  had  the  better 
of  it. 

Before  attempting  to  analyze  the  pedigree  of  Messenger,  or 
rather  that  of  his  dam,  with  which  the  chief  difficulty  lies,  we 
will  go  back  to  the  head  of  the  male  line  and  consider  each  suc- 
cessive generation.  The  Darley  Arabian,  one  of  the  most  dis- 
tinguished of  all  the  founders  of  the  English  thoroughbred  horse, 


208  THE   HOUSE   OF   AMERICA. 

was  brought  from  Aleppo,  about  the  year  1710.  He  did  not 
cover  many  mares  except  those  of  his  owner  in  Yorkshire,  but  he 
was  very  successful.  Childers,  commonly  called  Flying  Childers, 
was  foaled  1715.  He  was  got  by  the  Darley  Arabian  out  of 
Betty  Leeds,  a  distinguished  lightweight  runner,  by  Careless. 
Childers  was  the  most  distinguished  race  horse  of  his  day,  and 
the  fabulous  story  of  his  having  run  a  mile  in  a  minute  was  cir- 
culated, believed  and  written  about  for  generations.  He  ran  a 
trial  against  Almanzor  and  Brown  Betty  over  the  round  course 
at  Newmarket  (three  miles,  six  furlongs  and  ninety-three  yards) 
in  six  minutes  and  forty  seconds,  "and  it  was  thought/'  says  the 
old  record,  "that  he  moved  eighty-two  feet  and  a  half  in  a  second 
of  time,  which  is  nearly  at  the  rate  of  one  mile  in  a  minute." 
This  was  the  basis  of  the  legend  "A  Mile  in  a  Minute,"  and  it 
has  lived  till  our  own  day,  just  as  many  a  traditional  pedigree 
has  lived.  If  we  accept  the  time  as  given  by  the  old  chroniclers, 
of  which  we  have  very  grave  doubts,  Childers  ran  at  the  rate  of 
one  minute  and  forty-five  seconds  to  the  mile,,,  and  he  covered  a 
distance  of  fifty  feet  and  about  two  inches  to  the  second  of  time. 
The  pedigree  of  Childers  on  the  maternal  side  is  one  of  the  old- 
est in  the  Stud  Book,  and  we  are  not  aware  that  any  charges 
have  ever  been  made  against  its  substantial  authenticity. 

BLAZE,  the  son  of  Childers,  was  foaled  1733,  and  was  out  of  a 
mare  known  as  "The  Confederate  Filly,"  by  Grey  Grantham;  her 
dam  was  by  the  Duke  of  Rutland's  Black  Barb,  and  her  grandam 
was  a  mare  of  unknown  breeding,  called  "Bright's  Roan."  Here 
the  maternal  line  runs  into  the  woods,  but  this  is  not  the  only 
defect  in  the  pedigree,  for  the  dam  of  Grey  Grantham  was  also 
unknown.  In  order  to  give  a  clear  idea  of  just  how  Blaze  was 
bred,  taking  the  Stud  Book  for  our  authority,  we  will  here  tabu- 
late the  pedigree  for  a  few  crosses. 

(  Darley  Arabian 
f  Childers  ........    4  ,  Careless 

B]aze  |  Betty  Leeds...    j  g^fo  Leeds. 

•*  u—  ^{rrriSar- 

Daughter  of..  .    -   Bribt,g  Roan  unknown 


Certainly  this  horse  cannot  be  ranked  as  thoroughbred  under 
any  rule,  English  or  American,  that  has  ever  been  formulated. 
Only  three  generations  away  we  find  two  animals  of  hopelessly 


MESSENGER   AND   HIS    ANCESTORS.  209 

unknown  breeding.  Mr.  Henry  F.  Euren,  compiler  of  the  Eng- 
lish Hackney  Stud  Book,  has  given  Blaze  a  new  place  in  horse 
genealogy,  and  this  new  place  affects  the  American  trotter,  re- 
motely, outside  of  the  line  through  Messenger.  Mr.  Lawrence, 
the  best  English  authority  on  horse  matters  in  the  latter  part  of 
the  last  and  the  beginning  of  the  present  century,  had  main- 
tained, confessedly  on  tradition  only,  that  Old  Shales,  the  great 
fountain  head  of  the  English  trotters  of  a  hundred  years  ago,  was 
a  son  of  Blank,  by  Godolphin  Arabian.  On  this  point  Mr.  Euren 
has  got  farther  back  and  found  earlier  evidence  in  printed  form 
that  Blaze  and  not  Blank  was  the  sire  of  Old  Shales.  We  corn- 
hated  this  claim  for  a  time,  but  in  the  introduction  to  his  Stud 
Book  he  has  made  out  a  very  good  case,  and  we  have  hardly  a 
doubt  but  that  he  is  correct.  In  speaking  of  the  breeding  of  Shales, 
and  of  his  dam  being  a  "strong  common-bred  mare,"  he  says:  "It 
is  of  interest  to  examine  the  pedigree  of  the  sire  (Blaze)  to  deter- 
mine whether  yet  stronger  racing  or  pacing  elements  existed  on 
that  side."  After  giving  a  tabulation  of  the  pedigree  he  con- 
tinues: "There  would  thus  appear  to  have  been  a  large  propor- 
tion of  English  (native)  blood  in  the  dam  of  Blaze,  though  no 
one  can  say  what  was  its  character — whether  running,  trotting, 
or  ambling."  In  referring  to  the  fact  that  Bellfounder  was  a 
descendant  of  Old  Shales,  the  son  of  Blaze,  Mr.  Euren  makes 
this  practical  application  of  the  incident: 

"  The  fact  that  in  the  seventh  generation  from  Blaze,  on  each  side,  the  re- 
union of  the  blood  in  Rysdyk's  Hambletonian,  the  sire  of  so  many  fast  Ameri- 
can trotting  horses,  should  have  proved  to  be  of  the  most  impressive  character, 
would  appear  to  warrant  the  conclusion  that  there  was  a  strong  latent  trotting 
tendency  in  the  near  ancestors,  on  one.  if  not  on  both,  sides  of  Blaze." 

These  two  points  from  a  very  high  English  authority — that 
Blaze  was  not  thoroughbred  and  that  he  was  the  sire  of  Shales, 
a  great  trotting  progenitor,  must  have  due  weight  in  reaching 
sound  conclusions. 

SAMPSON,  the  son  of  Blaze,  was  foaled  1745,  and  he  has  occu- 
pied a  very  prominent  and  at  the  same  time  unique  place  in  run- 
ning-horse history.  He  was  not  only  a  great  race  horse,  at  heavy 
weights,  but  he  was  considered  phenomenal  in  his  size  and 
strength,  and  in  his  lack  of  the  appearance  of  a  race  horse. 
Some  of  his  measurements  have  come  down  to  us,  and  as  they  are 
reliable  data  as  to  what  was  considered  a  remarkably  large  and 


210  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

strong  race  horse  a  hundred  and  forty  years  ago,  we  will  repro- 
duce them  here  in  order  that  the  curious  may  compare  them  with, 
the  average  race  horse  of  this  generation: 

Height  on  the  withers,  15  hands  2  inches;  dimensions  of  fore  leg  from  the 
hair  of  the  hoof  to  middle  of  fetlock  joint,  4  inches;  from  fetlock  joint  to  bend 
of  the  knee,  11  inches;  from  bend  of  knee  to  elbow,  19  inches;  round  fore  leg 
below  knee,  narrowest  part,  Scinches;  round  hind  leg,  narrowest  part,  9  inches. 

These  measurements  may  not  seem  to  merit  any  particular  at- 
tention at  this  day,  but  a  hundred  and  fifty  years  ago  they  were 
considered  phenomenal  in  the  race  horse.  But  we  are  not  left 
to  the  dry  details  of  a  certain  number  of  inches  and  fractions  of 
an  inch  upon  which  to  base  a  just  conception  of  the  strength  and 
substance  of  this  horse.  A  number  of  historians  have  told  us  of 
the  merriment  among  the  grooms  and  jockeys  when  Sampson 
made  his  first  appearance  on  the  turf.  The  question  was,  "Has 
Mr.  Eobinson  brought  a  coach  horse  here  to  run  for  the  plate?" 
The  laugh  was  on  the  other  side  at  Malton  that  day,  however, 
when  the  "coach  horse/'  carrying  one  hundred  and  forty  pounds, 
won  the  plate  in  three  heats.  The  distance  was  three  miles,  and 
Sampson  was  then  five  years  old.  At  long  distances  and  at  high 
weights  Sampson  was  a  first-class  race  horse  for  his  day.  But, 
notwithstanding  all  this,  we  are  told  that  his  blood  never  became 
fashionable,  for  there  was  a  widespread  conviction  that  he  was 
not  running-bred  on  the  side  of  his  dam.  The  historians  tell  us 
that  he  transmitted  his  own  coarseness  and  lack  of  the  true  run- 
ning type  in  a  marked  degree,  which  was  very  evident  in  his 
grandson,  Mambrino. 

His  pedigree  has  been  questioned  from  the  day  of  his  first 
appearance  to  the  present  time,  and  we  have  made  a  very  careful 
study  of  all  the  facts  at  our  command.  In  the  first  edition  of 
his  Stud  Book  (1803)  Mr.  Weatherby  gives  his  dam  as  by  Hip;  g.  d. 
by  Spark,  son  of  Honeycomb  Punch;  g.  g.  d.  by  Snake  and  out  of 
Lord  D'Arcy's  Queen.  This  has  not  been  materially  changed  in 
any  of  the  subsequent  editions,  and  we  think  it  may  be  taken  for 
granted  that  the  horse  was  advertised  under  this  pedigree.  Mr. 
Weatherby  commenced  work  on  pedigrees  in  1791,  arid  avowedly 
accepted  the  best  information  he  could  get  with  regard  to  old 
pedigrees,  regardless  of  the  source.  We  are  not  aware  that  he1 
ever  investigated  anything  outside  of  his  office  work,  or  if  he  did 
he  never  gave  the  public  the  benefit  of  the  details  of  his  invest!- 


MESSENGER   AND   HIS   ANCESTORS. 

gations.  John  Lawrence  commenced  work  on  horse  history  long 
before  Mr.  Weatherby  commenced  as  a  compiler  of  pedigrees,  and 
he  was  altogether  the  ablest  writer  of  his  day,  or  perhaps  we 
might  add,  of  any  other  day.  He  was  a  clear  and  independent 
thinker  and  a  vigorous  writer.  In  his  "History  of  the  Horse  in 
all  His  Varieties  and  Uses,"  on  page  281,  he  thus  discusses  the 
question  of  Sampson's  pedigree: 

"Nobody  yet  ever  did,  or  ever  could  assert  positively  that  Jigg  was  not 
thoroughbred,  but  the  case  is  very  different  with  respect  to  Sampson;  since 
nobody  in  the  sporting  world,  either  of  past  or  present  days,  ever  supposed 
him  so.  Nor  was  the  said  world  at  all  surprised  at  Robinson's  people  furnish- 
ing their  stallion  with  a  good  and  true  pedigree,  a  thing  so  much  to  their  ad- 
vantage. Having  seen  a  number  of  Sampson's  immediate  get,  those  in  the 
Lord  Marquis  of  Rockingham's  stud  and  others,  and  all  of  them,  Bay  Malton 
perhaps  less  than  any  other,  in  their  heads,  size  and  form,  having  the  appear- 
ance of  being  a  degree  or  two  deficient  in  racing  blood,  I  was  convinced  that 
the  then  universal  opinion  <>n  that  point  was  well  grounded.  I  was  (in  1778) 
an  enthusiast,  collecting  materials  for  a  book  on  the  horse.  It  happened  that 
I  wanted  a  trusty  and  steady  man  for  a  particular  service,  and  opportunely  for 
the  matter  now  under  discussion,  a  Yorkshire  man  about  threescore  years  of 
age  was  recommended  to  me,  who  had  recently  been  employed  in  certnin  stables. 
I  soon  found  that  his  early  life  had  been  spent  in  the  running  stables  of  the 
North,  and  that  he  had  known  Sampson,  whence  he  was  always  afterward 
named  by  us  'Old  Sampson.'  He  was  very  intelligent  on  thesubject  of  racing 
T  ck  ami  his  report  was  as  follows.  He  took  the  mare  to  Blaze,  for  the  cover 
'.v'uich  produced  Sampson,  helped  to  bit  and  break  the  colt,  rode  him  in  exer- 
•  ise  and  afterward  took  him  to  Malton  for  his  first  start,  where,  before  the  race, 
IIP  was  ridiculed  for  bringing  a  great  coach  horse  to  contend  against  racers. 
On  the  sale  of  Sampson  this  man  left  the  service  of  James  Preston,  Esq.,  and 
went  with  the  colt  into  that  of  Mr.  Robinson.  His  account  of  Sampson's  dam  was 
that  she  appeared  about  three  parts  bred,  a  hunting  figure  and  by  report  a 
daughter  of  Hip,  which,  however,  could  not  be  authenticated;  and  the  fact 
was  then  notorious  and  not  disputed  in  the  Yorkshire  stables.  .  .  .  Mr. 
Tattersall  lately  stowed  me  a  portrait  of  Sampson  in  his  flesh,  in  which  this 
defect  of  blood  appears  far  more  obvious  than  in  one  which  I  had  of  him 
galloping." 

Again,  in  his  great  quarto  work,  issued  1809,  Mr.    Lawrence 
reiterates  his  belief  that  Sampson  was  not  thoroughbred.     He 


"I  am  by  no  means  disposed  to  retract  my  opinion  concerning  Robinson's 
Sampson.  Not  only  did  the  account  of  the  groom  appear  to  me  to  be  entitled 
to  credit,  but  the  internal  evidence  of  the  horse's  having  had  in  him  a  cross  of 
common  blood  is  sufficiently  strong  by  the  appearance  both  of  the  horse  him- 
self and  of  his  stock;  an  idea  in  which  every  sportsman,  I  believe,  who  re- 
members Engineer,  Mambrino  and  others  will  agree  with  me." 


THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 


Here  then,  we  have  the  answer  to  the  whole  inquiry  reduced 
to  its  simplest  form.  The  groom  who  coupled  the  mare  with 
Blaze  from  which  came  Sampson  says  the  mare  was  called  a  Hip 
mare,  hut  that  her  pedigree  was  really  unknown.  For  the  intel- 
ligence and  honesty  of  this  groom  Mr.  Lawrence  does  not  hesi- 
tate to  vouch,  and  he  adds  the  common  belief  of  all  the  York- 
shire sportsmen  of  that  day,  who  knew  the  mare,  that  she  was  of 
unknown  breeding.  This  evidence  is  further  supplemented  by 
the  family  characteristics  of  the  stock  descended  from  Sampson, 
to  say  nothing  of  the  great  lack  of  "blood"  in  the  appearance  of 
Sampson  himself.  As  against  this  we  have  the  dry,  unsupported 
assertion  of  Mr.  Weatherby,  forty  years  after  the  event,  and  prob- 
ably copied  from  an  advertisement  of  the  horse.  In  view  of  all 
this  we  must  tabulate  the  pedigree  of  Sampson  as  follows: 


Sampson.  , 
(1745). 


Blaze.. 


Called  a  Hip   Mare 
(Unknown), 


Confederate  Fi,,y 


ENGINEER,  son  of  Sampson,  was  a  brown  horse,  foaled  1755,  and 
was  out  of  Miner's  dam,  by  Young  Greyhound;  grandam  by  Cur- 
wen's  Bay  Barb,  and  the  next  dam  unknown.  This  is  all  the 
pedigree  that  has  ever  been  even  claimed  for  this  horse,  and  it 
falls  far  short  of  the  rank  of  thoroughbred.  That  the  eye  may 
take  it  all  in  at  a  glance  we  will  here  put  it  into  tabular  form. 
There  is  a  discrepancy  of  one  year  between  Weatherby  and  Pick 
in  the  age  of  the  horse,  and  we  find  Pick  is  right  in  giving  his 
date  as  1755. 


Guilders. 
Confederate  Filly. 


Engineer                •< 

r  Sampson.  .  .  . 

(  Unknown. 

(1755). 

_  Miner's  dam. 

{Young  Greyhound  . 
D.  of  Bay  Barb  .  .  . 

Unknown. 

Notwithstanding  the  absence  of  Eastern  blood,  Engineer  was  a 
race  horse  of  above  average  ability,  although  not  so  good  as  an- 
other son  of  Sampson  called  Bay  Malton.  A  few  of  his  sons 
aside  from  Mambrino  ran  respectably,  and  his  daughters  were,  at 
one  time,  highly  prized  as  brood  mares. 


MESSENGER   AND    HIS   ANCESTORS.  213 

MAMBRINO,  the  son  of  Engineer,  was  a  great  strong-boned  grey 
horse,  bred  by  John  Atkinson  near  Leeds  in  Yorkshire,  and  was 
foaled  1768.  His  dam  was  by  Cade,  son  of  the  Godolphin 
Arabian;  g.  d.  by  Bolton  Little  John;  g.  g.  d.  Favorite  by  a 
son  of  Bald  Galloway,  etc.  The  Cade  mare  produced  Dulcine,  a 
a  noted  performer,  and  the  mare  Favorite  was  a  distinguished 
performer  herself.  The  poverty  of  this  pedigree  is  all  on  the 
side  of  the  sire,  as  will  be  seen  by  a  brief  tabulation. 

(Sampson....   j  g1**6' 

f  EngiDeer Miner,s  dam  Yo^ng Greyhound. 

v      ,    .  I  Mmer  S  dam>  ]  D.  of  Bay  Barb. 

Mambrino x  ««,i~iwu:,.  A.-K: 

(1768).  (Cade 


Daughter  of. 


(  Daughter  of. 


Godolphin  Arabian. 
Roxana. 


Bolton  Little  John. 
Favorite. 


It  is  worthy  of  note  here,  as  a  curious  fact,  that  Mambrino  had 
two  pacing  crosses.  Roxana,  the  dam  of  Cade,  was  by  Bald  Gal- 
loway and  Favorite  was  by  a  son  of  Bald  Galloway.  This  horse 
Bald  Galloway  was  a  distinguished  representative  of  the  famous 
old  tribe  of  pacers  known  as  the  " Galloways,''  from  the  province 
of  Galloway  in  Southwestern  Scotland. 

Mambrino  was  not  put  upon  the  turf  till  he  was  five  years  old, 
and  he  proved  himself  a  great  race  horse  in  the  best  company 
and  for  the  largest  class  of  stakes.  He  was  on  the  turf  most  of 
the  time  for  five  or  six  years  and  until  he  was  beaten  by  Wood- 
pecker in  1779,  in  which  race  he  broke  down.  He  was  beaten 
but  four  times,  and  paid  four  forfeits.  He  went  into  the  stud  in 
the  spring  of  1777,  although  he  ran  after  that,  at  lOgs.  10s.  6d. 
to  cover  thirty  mares  besides  those  of  his  owners.  In  1779  he 
was  again  in  the  stud,  in  Cambridgeshire  as  before,  at  the  same 
price;  1781  he  covered  at  50gs.  10.  6d.;  1784  at  15gs.  10.  6d.;. 
1785  at  25gs.  10s.  6d.;  1786  he  dropped  back  to  logs.  10s.  6d. 

We  give  these  prices  to  show  the  variations  in  the  estimated 
value  of  his  services.  As  a  sire  of  race  horses  Mambrino  was  not 
successful.  Some  fifteen  or  twenty  of  his  progeny  ran  more  or 
less  respectably,  but  none  of  them  was  at  all  comparable  with 
himself.  While  he  was  a  comparative  failure  as  a  racing  sire 
there  was  another  qualification  in  which  he  attained  great  emi- 
nence and  distinction.  In  the  second  volume  of  Pick's  Turf  Eeg- 
ister,  published  1805,  on  page  266,  we  find  the  following  para- 
graph appended  to  the  history  there  given  of  this  horse: 


"214  THE   HORSE   OF  AMERICA. 

"  Mauabrino  was  likewise  sire  of  a  great  many  excellent  hunters  and  strong, 
useful  road  horses.  And  it  has  been  said  that  from  his  blood  the  breed  of 
horses  for  the  coach  was  brought  nearly  to  perfection." 

This  paragraph,  considering  its  date  (1805),  the  authority 
from  which  it  comes,  and  the  peculiar  circumstances  which 
prompted  its  utterance,  has  a  most  striking  significance.  After 
years  of  familiarity  with  Mr.  Pick's  works  we  can  say  freely  that 
we  never  have  been  able  to  find  any  allusion  or  reference  to  the 
qualities  of  any  horse  portrayed  by  him  other  than  his  running 
qualities.  This  reference  to  the  adaptabilities  of  the  progeny  of 
Mambrino  stands  alone.  The  i  'blood  that  brought  the  breed  of 
coach  horses  nearly  to  perfection"  must  have  been  blood  that 
gave  the  "breed"  a  long,  slinging,  road-devouring  trot,  as  well 
as  size  and  strength.  The  very  same  qualifications  were  observed 
and  noted  in  the  descendants  of  Mambrino  in  this  country  forty 
and  fifty  years  ago,  and  at  no  time  in  our  history  have  we  had 
such  unapproachable  coach  horses  as  the  great-grandsons  of 
Mambrino.  What  has  been  said,  therefore,  by  Mr.  Pick  of  the 
"coach-horse"  qualities  of  the  descendants  of  Mambrino  in  Eng- 
land has  been  fully  realized  and  verified  in  his  descendants, 
through  Messenger,  in  this  country. 

The  question  here  arises  whether  Mambrino  ever  showed  any 
remarkable  trotting  action  himself  that  would  seem  to  justify 
this  estimate  of  the  trotting  action  of  his  descendants?  Several 
writers,  and  among  them  Mr.  Lawrence,  have  spoken  of  this 
peculiarity  of  Mambrino's  incidentally,  but  the  most  tangible 
account  we  have  of  it  is  furnished  by  an  English  writer  to  the 
Sporting  Magazine,  who  dates  his  letter  from  the  "Subscrip- 
tion Rooms,  TattersalPs,  1814."  These  "subscription  rooms" 
were  the  very  focus  of  sporting  events,  and  this  writer  seems  to 
be  unusually  intelligent  on  this  class  of  subjects.  The  object 
and  point  of  his  communication  is  to  prove  that  no  thoroughbred 
hor~e  could  be  developed  into  a  fast  trotter.  "Hence,"  he  says, 
"no  thoroughbred  was  ever  known  capable  of  trotting  sixteen 
miles  within  the  hour,  and  only  one  stands  on  record  as  having 
trotted  fifteen  miles  within  one  hour.  That  was  Infidel,  by 
Turk,  who  performed  it  in  the  North,  carrying  nine  or  ten  stone. 
Several  race  horses  have  been  supposed  capable  of  trotting  four- 
teen miles  in  one  -hour,  and  it  is  reported  that  the  late  Lord 
Grosvenor  once  offered  to  match  Mambrino  to  do  it  for  a  thou- 
sand guineas."  Now  this  writer  does  not  say  that  Lord  Gros- 


MESSENGER   AND    HIS    ANCESTORS.  215 

yenor  really  made  such  an  offer,  but  only  that  he  was  "reported" 
to  have  made  it.  This  does  not  prove  that  the  offer  was  formally 
made,  but  it  does  prove  that  Mambrino  had  a  very  remarkable 
trotting  step  or  such  a  topic  would  not  have  been  considered  at 
TattersalPs  subscription  rooms.  As  this  writer  seems  to  refer  to 
Mambrino  and  Infidel  only  as  exceptional  horses  for  their  trot- 
ting step  among  thoroughbreds,  we  may  take  it  for  granted  that 
Mambrino  was  considered  exceptional,  in  his  day.  It  is  not 
probable  that  he  was  ever  trained  an  hour  at  the  trot,  and  we 
must  conclude,  therefore,  that  whatever  speed  he  showed  was  his 
natural  and  undeveloped  gait.  It  will  be  observed  that  Mr. 
Pick's  paragraph  was  dated  1805,  and  the  letter  from  the  "sub- 
scription rooms"  1814,  so  that  they  could  not  have  been  mere  re- 
flections of  theories  advanced  on  this  side  of  the  Atlantic  in  rela- 
iion  to  Messenger  being  a  great  source  of  trotting  speed.  These 
two  facts  were  on  record  long  before  any  "Messenger  theories" 
were  in  existence,  and  those  "theories"  were  formulated  long  be- 
fore these  two  facts  were  known.  The  conclusions  reached  on 
both  sides  of  the  water  are  entirely  harmonious,  but  they  were 
reached  in  complete  independence  of  each  other. 

MESSENGER,  son  of  Mambrino,  was  a  grey  horse  about  fifteen 
hands  two  inches  high,  with  strong,  heavy  bone  and  a  generally 
coarse  appearance  for  a  horse  represented  to  be  thoroughbred. 
From  the  Racing  Calendar,  and  not  from  the  Stud  Book,  we  learn 
that  he  was  foaled  1780,  and  came  out  of  a  mare  represented  to 
be  by  Turf,  and  she  out  of  a  mare  by  Regains,  son  of  Godolphin 
Arabian,  etc.,  as  represented  by  Mr.  Weatherby  in  his  Stud 
Book.  By  looking  back  to  the  beginning  of  this  chapter  the 
form  in  which  the  entry  appears  in  the  Stud  Book  will  be  fully 
comprehended.  The  identity,  history,  and  breeding  of  the  dam 
of  Messenger  is  the  central  point  in  this  inquiry,  and  we  must  do 
our  work  carefully  and  thoroughly.  From  the  form  of  the  entry 
in  the  Stud  Book,  it  will  be  understood  that  the  breeder  of  each 
animal  is  supposed  to  appear  opposite  the  foals  of  his  own  breed- 
ing, but  this  we  have  found  in  more  than  a  thousand  instances 
to  be  wholly  imaginary  on  the  part  of  the  compiler.  If  the 
animal  ran,  the  name  of  the  party  running  him  is  far  more  apt 
to  appear  than  the  name  of  the  breeder.  It  will  be  observed, 
also,  that  the  Turf  fillies  of  1773  and  1774  appear  without  their 
<3olor  being  known.  These  fillies  seem  to  be  put  in  there  to  par- 
tially fill  the  gap  between  1771  and  1777.  Mr.  Pick  says  the  dam 


216  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

of  Messenger  was  black,  but  he  gives  no  account  of  her  further 
than  that.  Whether  Mr.  Pick  was  indebted  to  Mr.  Weatherby, 
or  Weatherby  to  Pick,  I  cannot  say,  but  they  both  give  the 
pedigree  just  as  we  have  given  it  in  this  country.  I  am  not 
inquiring  whether  these  authorities  agree  on  this  pedigree,  but 
whether  they  knew  anything  about  it,  and  whether  there  is  such 
agreement  in  details  between  them  as  will  support  each  other. 

The  first  question  that  arises  in  every  man's  mind  is,  whether 
there  is  any  further  trace  of  this  Turf  mare,  the  reputed  dam  of 
Messenger,  in  the  Stud  Book,  by  whom  was  she  bred  and  owned, 
and  by  whom  was  Messenger  bred?  Pick  says  the  Turf  mare  was- 
bred  by  Lord  Bolingbroke,  and  Weatherby  says  she  was  bred  by 
Lord  Grosvenor.  To  test  the  question  whether  either  is  right, 
I  have  gone  through  the  English  Stud  Book,  page  by  page,  and 
pedigree  by  pedigree,  wherever  I  found  the  name  of  Lord 
Bolingbroke,  or  Lord  Grosvenor,  to  see  if  any  trace  of  the  Turf 
mare  could  be  found.  I  found  no  shadow  of  trace.  The 
certificate  of  pedigree  that  came  across  the  ocean  with  Messenger 
represents  him  to  have  been  bred  by  John  Pratt,  and  Mr.  Pick, 
or  rather  his  successor,  Mr.  Johnson,  says  he  was  bred  and  owned 
by  Mr.  Bullock.  These  clear  and  explicit  declarations  gave 
new  hopes  of  finding  something  of  the  Turf  mare,  and  at  it  I 
went  again,  and  searched  every  pedigree  that  had  .the  name  of 
Mr.  Pratt  or  Mr.  Bullock  attached  to  it,  with  no  better  results 
than  before.  Now,  Lord  Bolingbroke,  Lord  Grosvenor,  Mr. 
Pratt  and  Mr.  Bullock  were  all  breeders,  and  if  any  of  them 
ever  owned  the  dam  of  Messenger  and  bred  from  her,  none  of 
her  produce  was  ever  recorded  or  ever  started  in  a  race. 

Thus,  the  more  we  search  for  the  truth  about  Messenger  and 
his  origin,  the  more  dense  becomes  the  mystery.  When  we  find 
an  English  authority  that  seems  clear,  we  find  another  that  con- 
tradicts him,  and  probably  neither  of  them  knows  anything 
about  it  beyond  uncertain  tradition.  When  we  consider  these 
contradictions  of  authorities  in  connection  with  the  fact  that 
men  were  just  as  prone  to  lie  and  fix  up  a  bogus  pedigree  a  hun- 
dred years  ago  as  they  are  to-day,  and  that  stud-book  makers 
were  just  as  liable  to  be  deceived  then  as  now,  we  must  conclude 
that  there  is  room  for  very  serious  doubts  as  to  whether 
Weatherby  or  Pick  knew  anything  about  the  pedigree  of  Mes- 
senger, or  by  whom  he  was  bred. 

In  pushing  our  inquiries  still  further  in  search  of  this  mare, 


MESSENGER    AXD    HIS    ANCESTORS.  217 

-we  must  consider  somewhat  in  detail  Mr.  Weatherby's  methods 
.and  the  degree  of  responsibility  he  assumed  for  the  accuracy  of  his 
compilations.  In  1791  he  published  what  he  called  ''An  Intro- 
duction to  a  General  Stud  Book/'  containing,  as  he  says,  "a  small 
collection  of  pedigrees  which  he  had  extracted  from  racing  cal- 
endars and  sale  papers,  and  arranged  on  a  new  plan."  In  May, 
1800,  he  issued  a  supplement  to  his  "Introduction"  bringing 
down  the  produce  of  mares  to  1799.  In  1803  he  issued  what  we 
.suppose  is  the  first  edition  of  the  first  volume  of  tne  Stud  Book. 
The  title-page  reads,  "The  General  Stud  Book,  containing  pedi- 
grees of  race  horses,  etc.,  from  the  Restoration  to  the  present 
time."  The  imprint  is,  "Printed  for  James  Weatherby,  7 
Oxenden  Street,  etc.,  London,  1803."  The  volume  contains 
three  hundred  and  eighty-four  pages,  while  the  edition  of  1827 
contains  four  hundred  and  forty-eight  pages.  There  is  no 
'•Volume  I."  on  the  title-page,  nor  is  there  any  indication  that 
this  is  a  continuation  or  revision  of  any  preceding  work.  It 
brings  down  the  list  of  produce  in  many  cases  to  and  including 
1803,  but  none  later  than  that  year,  so  there  can  be  no  mistake 
as  to  when  it  was  issued. 

I  have  been  thus  particular  in  identifying  this  first  edition 
of  the  first  volume  of  the  English  Stud  Book,  for  it  gives  us  an 
insight  into  the  methods  employed  by  Mr.  Weatherby  in  the  prog- 
ress of  his  work.  Upon  a  careful  comparison  of  the  editions  of 
1803  with  1827  extending  through  the  letters  A,  B,  and  M,  we 
find  that  he  has  thrown  out  more  than  ten  per  cent,  of  the  entire 
families  in  the  edition  of  1803.  By  "entire  families"  I  mean 
T)rood  mares,  with  their  lists  of  produce.  In  making  these  ex- 
clusions he  seems  to  have  confined  himself  to  what  may  be  con- 
sidered the  historic  period,  at  that  day,  and  did  not  go  back 
further  than  about  twenty  years.  Beyond  that  period  everything 
was  traditional,  and  he  appears  to  have  shrunk  from  all  responsi- 
bility of  attempting  the  exclusion  of  families.  On  and  near  the 
border  line  between  these  periods  he  seems  to  have  taken  the  re- 
sponsibility of  cutting  off  a  great  many  individuals  of  doubtful 
identity,  even  though  the  family  was  left  to  stand  on  its  uncer- 
tain basis  of  tradition.  I  cannot  say  positively  that  the  dam 
of  Messenger  and  her  sister  were  cut  off  with  the  multitude  of 
others,  but  I  can  say  that  neither  of  them  ever  appeared  again 
in  the  Stud  Book.  Other  members  of  the  family  of  the  Eegulus 
mare  have  places  for  their  descendants  in  subsequent  volumes, 


THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

from  which  I  would  infer  that  Mr.  Weatherby  considered  her 
breeding  all  right,  but  the  two  fillies,  one  of  them  the  dam  of 
Messenger,  have  been  treated  as  spurious  and  wholly  omitted 
from  the  records.  These  are  the  facts  relating  to  these  two 
fillies  claimed  originally  to  be  by  Turf,  and  there  can  be  no  moral 
doubt  that  they  were  omitted  or  excluded  because  Mr.  Weatherby 
deemed  them  unsustained  and  probably  spurious. 

In  confirmation  of  the  facts  and  circumstances  already  adduced, 
going  to  show  that  Messenger  was  not  thoroughbred,  we  are  now 
ready  to  consider  one  of  the  strongest  arguments  that  can  be 
advanced  in  support  of  that  conclusion.  This  argument  is 
founded  on  the  laws  of  nature  and  is  not  dependent  upon  the 
mere  writing  down  of  uncertain  traditions.  Messenger  pos- 
sessed and  transmitted  qualities  that  no  thoroughbred  horse  has 
ever  transmitted,  from  the  period  when  the  breed  of  race  horses, 
was  formed  to  the  present  day.  It  is  practically  conceded  on  all 
hands  that  Messenger,  by  his  own  power  and  by  his  own  right, 
founded  a  family  of  trotting  horses,  and  this  fact  will  be  fully 
demonstrated  in  coming  chapters.  It  is  equally  plain  and,  with 
honest  and  intelligent  people,  it  is  accepted  with  equal  readiness, 
that  no  thoroughbred  horse  has  ever  done  this.  This  declara- 
tion has  been  much  controverted,  but  always  in  a  general  way 
and  without  specifying  any  particular  thoroughbred  horse  that 
had  succeeded  in  establishing  a  family  of  trotters.  In  the  prog- 
ress of  a  discussion  of  this  point  with  the  late  Charles  J.  Foster, 
a  very  clear  and  able  writer,  he  was  directly  challenged,  in  a 
manner  that  could  not  be  dodged,  to  name  the  thoroughbred 
horse  outside  of  Messenger,  that  had  accomplished  this  feat. 
Greatly  to  my  surprise,  and  I  might  say,  gratification,  he  came 
back  at  me  with  two  of  Messenger's  sons — Hambletonian  and 
Mambrino.  Thus  he  conceded  the  whole  contention,  for  out  of, 
literally,  thousands  he  had  to  come  back  to  two  sons  of  Messenger. 

In  reply  to  an  article  in  Wallace's  Monthly  for  December,  1887,. 
going  to  show  that  Messenger  was  not  a  thoroughbred  horse,  Mr. 
Joseph  Cairn  Simpson,  of  California,  an  able  man  and  a  lifelong 
advocate  of  more  running  blood  in  the  trotter,  wrote  a  review  of 
the  article  in  question.  After  admitting  the  full  force  of  the 
demonstration  that  Messenger  was  not  a  thoroughbred  horse, 
there  is  one  sentence  to  which  Mr.  Simpson  cannot  subscribe, 
and  he  quotes  it  as  follows:  "Complete  and  conclusive  as  these 
facts  may  be.  there  is  still  another  fact  equally  complete  and 


MESSENGER   AND   HIS    ANCESTORS. 

still  more  convincing.  Messenger  possessed  and  transmitted 
qualities  that  no  throughbred  horse,  in  the  experience  of  man, 
ever  possessed  and  transmitted."  This  was  a  declaration  of  Messen- 
ger as  a  progenitor  against  the  whole  world  of  thoroughbreds, 
and  Mr.  Simpson  felt  that  he  could  not  let  it  pass  unchallenged, 
and  after  scratching  about  among  the  thousands  of  thorough- 
breds without  finding  anything,  like  poor  Mr.  Foster,  he 
"acknowledges  the  corn,"  and  comes  back  with  Mambrino,  the 
son  of  Messenger,  without,  seemingly,  once  realizing  that  he  was 
proving  my  contention. 

The  theory  that  if  any  other  English  race  horse  had  been  in 
Messenger's  place  and  bred  upon  the  same  mares  and  had  his 
progeny  developed  as  Messenger's  were  developed,  he  would  have 
produced  the  same  results,  has  always  been  very  popular  with 
the  advocates  of  "more  running  blood  in  the  trotter."  No 
doubt  there  are  still  some  honest,  but  not  well-informed  people, 
who  hold  to  this  view  merely  because  they  have  never  heard  of 
any  other  imported  English  horses  that  were  contemporaneous 
with  Messenger,  and  hence  have  concluded  there  were  none.  If 
Messenger  had  been  all  alone  during  the  twenty  years  of  his  stud 
services,  as  this  theory  assumes,  there  might  be  some  reason  to 
doubt  whether  some  other  English  race  horses  might  not  have 
done  just  as  well  in  establishing  a  line  or  tribe  of  trotters.  But 
was  he  alone?  From  the  close  of  the  Kevolutionary  War  to  the 
end  of  the  last  century  was  a  period  of  great  activity  and  enter- 
prise in  the  way  of  importing  running  horses  from  Great  Britain. 
The  blood  of  Herod  and  English  Eclipse  was  in  the  highest  esti- 
mate, not  only  in  the  old  but  in  the  new  world,  and  a  great  many 
distinguished  horses  were  brought  over  possessing  those  favorite- 
strains.  During  that  period  racing  was  carried  on  with  just  as 
much  spirit  and  eclat  on  Long  Island  and  the  river  counties  of 
New  York,  New  Jersey,  and  some  of  the  eastern  counties  of 
Pennsylvania  as  it  was  in  Virginia  and  South  Carolina.  Horses 
of  the  most  fashionable  lineage  were  sought  after  and  patronized, 
not  by  a  few  great  breeding  establishments,  but  by  the  farmers 
generally,  in  all  the  region  here  designated.  The  following  list 
of  imported  English  race  horses  is  made  up  of  animals  that  were- 
contemporaneous  with  Messenger,  covering  the  same  mares  and 
the  offspring  subjected  to  precisely  the  same  treatment  and  con- 
ditions. The  list  is  limited  to  what  may  be  called  the  trotting 
latitudes,  and  embraces  such  animals  only  as  were  brought  into- 


'220  THE    HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

New  Jersey,  New  York  and  Eastern  Pennsylvania.  We  will  not 
only  give  their  names,  but  the  blood  elements  also,  so  that  all 
can  see  that  Messenger  not  only  had  competitors  but  competitors 
of  the  highest  grade  of  running  blood. 

Admiral,  by  Florizel,  son  of  King  Herod. 

Ancient  Pistol,  by  Ancient  Pistol,  son  of  Snap. 

Arrakooker,  by  Drone,  son  of  King  Herod. 

Baronet,  by  Vertumnus,  son  of  Eclipse. 

Benjamin,  by  Ruler,  son  of  Young  Marske. 

Creeper,  by  Tandem,  son  of  Dainty  Davy. 

Deserter,  by  Lenox,  son  of  Delpini,  by  Highflyer. 

Dey  of  Algiers,  Arabian. 

Diomed  (Tate's),  by  Phenomenon,  son  of  King  Herod. 

Driver,  by  Saltram,  son  of  Eclipse. 

Drone,  by  King  Herod. 

Dungannon  (Young),  by  Dungannon. 

Expedition,  by  Pegasus,  son  of  Eclipse. 

Express,  by  Postmaster,  son  of  King  Herod. 

Exton,  by  Highflyer,  son  of  King  Herod. 

Florizel,  by  Florizel,  son  of  King  Herod. 

Grand  Seignor,  Arabian. 

Highflyer  (1732),  by  Highflyer. 

Highflyer  (1792),  by  Highflyer. 

Highlander  (Brown),  by  Paymaster. 

Highlander  (Gray),  by  Bordeaux. 

Honest  John,  by  Sir  Peter  Teazle. 

Joseph,  by  Ormond,  son  of  King  Fergus. 

King  William,  by  King  Herod. 

King  William,  by  Paymaster. 

Light  Infantry,  by  Eclipse. 

Magnetic  Needle,  by  Magnet. 

Magnum  Bonum,  by  Matchem. 

Nimrod,  by  King  Fergus. 

North  Star,  by  North  Star,  son  of  Matchem. 

Paymaster,  by  Paymaster. 

Prince  Frederick,  by  Fortunio. 

Punch,  by  King  Herod. 

Revenge,  by  Achilles. 

Rodney,  by  Paymaster. 

Royal  George,  by  Jupiter,  son  of  Eclipse. 

Royalist,  by  Saltram. 

Slender,  by  King  Herod. 

Sour  Grout,  by  Highflyer. 

Venetian,  by  Doge. 

Yorkshire,  by  Jupiter,  son  of  Eclipse. 

Here  we  have  forty-one  imported  English  stallions,  contem- 


MESSENGER   AND    HIS   ANCESTORS.  221 

poraneous  with  Messenger,  .occupying  the  same  territory  and 
covering  the  same  mares  that  he  covered.  With  the  exceptions 
of  two  or  three  they  were  all  ranked  as  not  only  thoroughbred, 
but  they  possessed  the  most  fashionable  and  successful  blood 
that  England  had  then  produced.  A  few  of  them  were  taken 
southward  after  a  time,  but  the  great  body  of  them  lived  out. 
their  days  here. 

To  this  great  array  of  imported  English  running  horses  we 
might  add  hundreds  of  their  sons,  and  yet  not  find  one  that  claimed 
to  be  thoroughbred  that  ever  became  a  trotting  progenitor  or 
founded  a  family  of  trotters.  Mr.  Foster  and  Mr.  Simpson,  by  far 
the  two  ablest  writers  on  the  wrong  side  of  the  question  that  this 
country  has  produced,  with  this  list  of  forty  English  stallions 
before  them  from  which  to  select  their  proof  that  Messenger  was 
not  the  only  progenitor  of  trotters,  were  at  last  compelled  to 
take  two  of  Messengers  sons,  as  trotting  progenitors,  to  prove 
that  their  sire  was  not  a  trotting  progenitor.  If  the  intellectual 
powers  of  these  two  gentlemen  had  enabled  them  to  scratch  ever 
so  little  beneath  the  glittering  surface  of  the  word  "thorough- 
bred," they  would  have  saved  themselves  from  this  humiliating 
exhibition  of  absurdity. 

What  was  true  of  Messenger's  contemporaries  is  equally  true 
of  all  the  strictly  thoroughbred  stallions  that  have  lived  on  the 
earth  from  his  day  to  the  present.  No  one  of  them  has  ever 
founded  a  trotting  family  and  no  one  of  them  has  ever  got  a  trotter 
out  of  a  mare  of  his  own  kind.  Out  of  the  half-dozen  instances 
on  record  where  a  thoroughbred  horse  has  got  a  trotter  there  is 
no  one  instance  in  which  the  dam  did  not  have  a  strong  pacing 
or  trotting  inheritance.  If  we  accept  the  known  and  recorded 
experiences  of  the  past  seventy  years,  in  the  trotting  world,  we 
find  two  great  facts  on  every  page  of  the  record.  First,  Mes- 
senger left  a  family  of  trotters;  second,  no  other  thoroughbred 
horse  did  that.  It  follows,  then,  that  if  Messenger  transmitted 
capacities  different  from  those  transmitted  by  thoroughbred 
horses,  he  must  have  had  a  different  inheritance  from  thorough- 
bred horses,  and  if  different,  then  that  inheritance  could  not  have 
been  thoroughbred.  From  the  facts  we  have  developed  in  the 
history  of  his  English  ancestors ;  from  the  ten  thousand  demonstra- 
tions of  his  American  descendants,  and  from  the  great  laws 
which  govern  the  transmission  of  special  capacities,  we  are  forced .. 
to  the  conclusion  that  Messenger  was  not  a  thoroughbred  horse. 


CHAPTER  XVIII. 

HISTORY    OF   MESSENGER. 

Messenger's  racing  in  England — His  breeder  unknown — Popular  uncertainty 
about  the  circumstances  and  date  of  liis  importation — The  matter  settled 
by  his  first  advertisement — Uncertainty  as  to  his  importer— Description  of 
Messenger  by  David  W.  Jones,  of  Long  Island — Careful  consensus  of  de- 
scriptions by  many  who  had  seen  Messenger — His  great  and  lasting  popu- 
larity as  a  stock  horse — Places  and  prices  of  his  services  for  twenty  years 
— Death  and  burial. 

MESSENGER  made  his  first  appearance  on  the  turf  in  October, 
1783,  then  three  years  old,  and  ran  twice,  successfully,  that  yearu 
He  continued  on  the  turf  till  November,  1785,  winning  eight 
races,  losing  six  and  receiving  forfeits  in  two.  Most  of  his  races 
were  practically  matches,  and  all  were  single  dashes  but  one,  in 
which  he  was  beaten.  Two  of  his  winnings  were  less  than  a 
mile,  five  at  the  distance  of  a  mile  and  a  quarter,  and  one  at  two 
miles.  These  distances  are  approximate.  He  was  beaten  at  two 
and  a  quarter  miles,  three,  and  three  and  a  half  miles.  He 
never  appeared  in  any  great  racing  event,  but  seemed  to  be 
managed  with  a  special  view  to  picking  up  small  prizes  at  short 
distances.  His  owner  and  manager,  Mr.  Bullock,  was  a  very 
shrewd  "professional"  at  Newmarket,  he  had  quite  a  number  of 
horses  in  the  same  stable  with  Messenger  and  some  of  them  seem 
to  have  been  selected  always  to  run  for  the  more  valuable  prizes. 
Considering  the  short  distances  he  was  able  to  run  and  the  unim- 
portant character  of  the  contests  in  which  he  was  engaged,  we 
must  conclude  that  Messenger  was  a  very  ordinary  race  horse. 

It  is  not  known  by  whom  Messenger  was  bred.  In  his  first 
advertisement  in  this  country  it  is  stated  that  he  was  bred  by 
John  Pratt,  of  Newmarket,  but  in  the  fourth  volume  of  Pick's 
''Turf  Register,"  continued  by  Johnson,  it  is  stated  explicitly  that 
he  "was  bred  by  and  the  property  of  Mr.  Bullock,  of  Newmarket." 
Mr.  John  Pratt  was  a  breeder  as  well  as  a  racing  man  of  some 
prominence,  in  his  day,  and  the  certificate  of  pedigree  from  him 
jMid  purporting  to  have  been  issued  by  him  was  probably  a  fraud, 


HISTOKY    OF   MESSEXGEK.  223 

as  he  died  May  8,  1785.  This  was  while  Messenger -was  still  on 
the  turf,  and  owned  and  controlled  by  Mr.  Bullock  for  two  years 
previous  to  this,  still  no  mention  is  made  of  the  fact,  and  Mr. 
Pratt  is  made  to  say  that  he  sold  him  to  the  Prince  of  Wales, 
while  all  the  evidence,  which  must  necessarily  be  of  a  negative 
character,  goes  to  show  that  the  Prince  of  Wales  never  owned 
him.  Mr.  Pratt  was  a  Yorkshire  man,  of  Askrigg,  in  the  Xorth 
Riding,  and  although  he  died  at  Newmarket  we  have  no  trace 
of  any  of  the  family  from  which  the  dam  of  Messenger  was  said 
to  have  descended  ever  being  in  his  possession.  Besides  this,  it 
is  not  likely  that  the  importer  of  Messenger  got  a  certificate  from 
him  two  years  after  his  death. 

The  different  representations  that  have  been  made  about  Mes- 
senger's importation  would  fill  a  much  larger  space  than  would 
be  profitable.  About  no  horse  has  there  been  so  much  written, 
and  about  no  horse  has  there  been  so  little  really  known.  His 
character  and  memory  have  never  suffered  defamation,  for  every 
writer  was  a  eulogist  of  the  most  enthusiastic  type,  whether  he 
knew  anything  of  his  hero  or  not.  As  a  specimen  of  the  admira- 
tion which  he  excited,  it  has  been  told  a  hundred  times  that 
when  the  horse  came  cavorting  down  the  gangplank  from  the 
ship,  with  a  groom  hanging  on  to  each  side  of  his  head,  literally 
carrying  them  for  some  distance  before  he  could  be  checked,  an 
enthusiastic  horseman  shouted  out,  "There,  in  that  horse  a  mil- 
lion dollars  strikes  American  soil/'  This  story  has  been  told  so 
often,  even  in  England,  that  no  doubt  many  people  believe  the 
startling  prophecy  was  really  uttered.  Indeed  we  have  heard  the 
name  of  the  prophet,  but  as  he  was  a  distinguished  New  Yorker 
and  as  debarkation  took  place  at  Philadelphia,  we  never  have 
been  able  to  fully  reconcile  the  actor  with  the  occasion.  The 
reputed  prophecy,  like  the  reputed  pedigree,  seems  to  have  been 
an  afterthought,  but  unlike  the  pedigree  it  proved  true,  whether 
uttered  or  not.  Some  said  he  was  imported  1785,  while  others 
dribbled  along  through  the  intermediate  years  till  1800  was  fixed 
upon  with  great  positiveness  as  the  precise  year.  One  of  these 
gentlemen,  we  remember  very  well,  was  entirely  confident  he 
returned  to  England  and  was  brought  back  again  after  a  number 
of  years.  Less  than  twenty  years  ago  the  breeding  world  was 
favored  with  scores  upon  scores  of  this  kind  of  teachers,  not  one 
of  whom  knew  what  he  was  talking  about.  The  most  surprising 
example  of  this  kind  of  writing,  however,  is  furnished  by  Mr.  C. 


224:  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

W.  Van  Banst,  himself,  who  was  part  owner  of  the  horse  a  num- 
ber of  years.  In  a  communication  published  in  Skinner's  "Turf 
Register,"  1831,  he  says  Messenger  was  imported  into  New  York 
in  1792,  and  in  the  same  publication  for  1834  he  says  he  was  im- 
ported into  New  York  1791.  As  the  sequel  will  show,  Mr.  Van 
Kanst,  although  his  owner,  had  no  definite  knowledge  of  the^ 
early  history  of  the  horse. 

From  some  slight  investigations  I  became  satisfied,  years  be- 
fore, that  Messenger  made  his  first  appearance  in  this  country  at 
Philadelphia,  and  that  he  was  imported  into  that  city  instead  of 
New  York.  In  that  view  all  the  writers  of  the  whole  country 
were  opposed  to  me;  but,  as  it  became  more  and  more  evident 
that  those  writers  were  merely  copying  from  one  another  and 
that  none  of  them  had  ever  made  an  honest  search  for  the  truth, 
I  resolved  to  follow  my  own  convictions  and  to  commence 
there  an  investigation  that  would  settle  the  matter  one  way  or 
the  other.  In  a  few  hours  after  reaching  that  city  I  found  a 
file  of  the  old  Pennsylvania  Packet,  and  in  the  number  dated  May 
27,  1788,  an  advertisement  of  which  the  following  is  a  true  copy: 

JUST  IMPORTED 

The  capital,  strong,  full  blooded,  English  stallion, 
MESSENGER. 

To  cover  mares  this  season  at  Alexander  Clay's,  at  the  sign  of  the  Black 
Horse,  LJ  Market  Street,  Philadelphia,  at  the  very  low  price  of  three  guineas 
each  mare,  and  one  dollar  to  the  groom. 

Messenger  was  bred  by  John  Pratt,  Esq.,  of  Newmarket,  who  certifies  the 
following  pedigree.  The  grey  horse  Messenger  was  bred  by  me  and  sold  to  the 
Prince  of  Wales;  he  was  got  by  Mambrino  (who  covered  at  twenty-five  guineas 
a  leap).  His  darn  by  Turf,  his  grandam  by  Regulus;  this  Regulus  mare  was 
sister  to  Figerant  and  was  the  dam  of  Leviathan.  JOHN  PRATT. 

The  performance  of  Messenger  has  been  so  very  great  that  there  need  only 
be  a  reference  to  the  racing  calendar  of  the  years  1783,  1784  and  1785. 

Any  mare  missing  this  season  shall  be  served  the  next  gratis,  provided; 
they  continue  the  same  properties,  on  paying  the  groom's  fees. 

This  is  a  literal  copy  of  the  first  printed  announcement  of  Mes- 
senger in  this  country,  and  there  are  two  very  striking  features 
connected  with  it,  namely,  its  bad  grammar  and  the  absence  of 
the  name  of  the  importer  and  owner.  The  former  we  may 
attribute  to  the  times,  but  to  the  latter  I  have  been  disposed  to 
attach  no  trifling  significance.  It  is  a  fact  that  till  this  day  we 
have  no  direct  information  as  to  who  imported  this  horse.  The 
name  "Benger"  was  developed  indirectly  as  the  man,  but  not: 


HISTORY   OF   MESSENGER.  225 

till  years  after  the  horse  was  dead,,  and  probably  the  importer  too, 
did  I  learn  from  an  advertisement  of  a  son  of  his  that  stood  in 
Jersey  that  the  importer's  name  was  "Thomas  Benger."  In  1791 
and  for  two  years  afterward  he  was  advertised  to  stand  at  "Mount 
Benger,  two  miles  from  Bristol,  Pennsylvania."  When  I  visited 
Bristol  for  the  purpose  of  identifying  "Mount  Benger,"  which  I 
supposed  was  the  country  seat  of  the  owner  of  Messenger,  I  was 
greatly  surprised  to  find  that  none  of  the  "oldest  inhabitants" 
had  ever  heard  of  such  a  place,  and  when  I  was  informed  that 
there  was  no  locality  within  half  a  dozen  miles  of  Bristol  where 
the  ground  rose  to  a  hundred  feet  above  the  level  of  the  Delaware 
River,  the  name  "Mount  Benger"  assumed  the  character  of  an 
absurdity  as  well  as  a  myth.  From  a  very  intelligent  man  of 
middle  age,  who  had  learned  the  blacksmith  trade  with  his  grand- 
father, I  learned  that  he  had  often  heard  his  grandfather  speak  of 
Messenger,  and  as  having  put  the  last  set  of  shoes  on  him  when 
he  was  taken  away  to  New  York  the  fall  the  yellow  fever  was  so 
bad  in  Philadelphia.  The  tradition  was  still  preserved  in  the 
family  that  Messenger  reared  up  in  crossing  the  river  in  a  boat, 
and  struck  his  groom  on  the  head  with  one  of  those  shoes,  from 
the  effects  of  which  he  died.  As  our  informant  was  able  to  name 
two  other  horses,  Governor  and  Babel,  brought  over  by  Mr. 
Benger,  we  were  ready  to  accept  his  tradition  that  he  lived  at  a 
point  known  in  old  times  as  "China  Retreat,"  two  miles  below 
Bristol  on  the  Delaware.  This  point  has  been  known  later  as 
"White  Hall." 

After  all  traditions  were  exhausted,  without  yielding  anything 
tangible  or  satisfactory,  we  turned  with  great  confidence  to  the 
records  of  the  county  of  Bucks,  in  which  Mr.  "Benger"  had 
lived  for  a  number  of  years.  After  a  diligent  and  protracted 
search,  embracing  a  number  of  years  before  and  after  his  known 
residence  in  the  county,  we  were  not  able  to  discover  that  any 
person  by  the  name  of  "Benger"  had  ever  owned  a  foot  of  real 
estate  in  the  county  or  had  been  in  any  way  publicly  connected 
with  its  affairs  or  its  administration.  We  had  search  made  in 
Philadelphia  with  the  same  fruitless  results.  There  is  a  faint 
tradition  that  Thomas  Benger,  if  that  was  his  name,  was  a  fox- 
hunting Irish  baronet,  and  if  this  was  so,  it  is  probable  he  re- 
turned to  the  old  country  about  the  time  he  sold  Messenger  in 
1793.  However  this  may  be,  the  owner  is  forgotten,  but  his 
horse  will  live  forever. 


226  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

Among  the  many  eulogies  and  word-paintings  of  Messenger, 
by  writers  who  knew  the  horse  personally,  we  select  the  follow- 
ing from  the  pen  of  the  late  David  W.  Jones,  of  Long  Island,  as 
the  most  striking  and  picturesque.  He  says: 

"  Having  scanned  in  n  y  boyhood  the  magnificent  form  and  bearing  of  this 
noble  old  horse,  and  for  more  than  half  a  century  having  drawn  reins  over  his 
descendants,  I  have  tor  a  length  of  time  felt  it  incumbent  to  furnish  such  facts 
and  impressions,  as,  when  considered  with  those  of  others,  will  give  the 
younger  portion  of  the  present  generation,  as  well  as  posterity,  a  fair  knowledge 
of  the  general  characteristics  of  the  noblest  Roman  of  them  all.  The  first  time 
I  ever  saw  old  Messenger  my  father  sent  me  to  the  farm  of  Townsend  Cock, 
Esq.,  of  the  County  of  Queens,  L.  I.,  where  the  horse  was  then  standing,  to 
receive  his  services.  On  my  arrival  at  his  harem,  I  found  the  groom,  whom  I 
knew,  and  he  at  once  placed  me  with  the  mare  a  short  distance  from  the  stable, 
by  the  side  of  a  barrier  erected  for  security.  Having  at  home  heard  frequent 
and  long  discussions  in  relation  to  the  wonder  I  was  now  to  behold,  you  may 
suppose  I  was  all  eyes.  Presently  the  stalwart  groom,  James  Lingham,  with, 
at  the  extreme  end  of  the  bridle  rein,  all  the  blood  of  all  the  Howards,  turned 
the  angle  of  the  stable  and  came  in  full  view.  The  moment  the  old  horse 
caught  sight  of  the  paragon  of  beauty  I  had  brought  to  his  embrace,  he  threw 
himself  into  an  attitude,  with  the  grandeur  of  which  no  other  animal  can  com- 
pare, and  at  the  same  moment  opened  his  mouth,  and  distending  his  nostrils, 
raised  his  exultant  voice  to  such  a  pitch  as  gave  unmistakable  evidence  of  the 
capacity  of  his  lungs  and  the  size  of  his  windpipe.  Indeed,  if  his  nostrils  were 
as  much  larger  than  ordinary  as  my  boyish  vision  pictured  them,  I  can  almost 
suppose  that  Mr.  McMann  with  his  little  bay  mare  (Flora  Temple),  and  sulky, 
could  drive  in  at  one,  down  the  windpipe,  turn  under  his  immensely  long 
arching  loin  and  out  at  the  other.  ...  At  that  early  day  I  was  only  im- 
pressed by  those  extraordinary  developments;  but  in  after  years  as  I  sit  behind 
his  offspring,  they  invariably  remind  me  of  what  was  then  to  my  youthful 
judgment  less  apparent — the  extraordinary  strength  of  his  loin,  the  length 
and  beautiful  molding  of  the  buttock,  the  faultless  shape  of  the  crupper 
bone,  giving  an  elegant  set  to  his  fine  flowing  tail,  as  well  as  the  remarkable 
swell  of  his  stifle,  altogether  forming  a  most  perfect  and  powerful  hind 
quarter." 

A  good  many  years  ago  I  made  a  special  study  of  all  that  had 
been  written  about  Messenger,  and  I  was  fortunate  in  being  able 
to  supplement  this  information  by  interviews  with  a  few  old 
gentlemen  who  knew  the  horse  personally.  Nearly  all  that 
generation  of  horsemen  had  passed  away  before  I  commenced  this 
personal  search  for  them.  But  a  few  then  remained  with  excel- 
lent memories  and  with  characters  above  suspicion  or  reproach. 
From  these  sources  I  gathered  a  great  many  incidents,  facts  and 
descriptions  which  I  succeeded  in  harmonizing,  to  my  own  mind 


HISTORY   OF   MESSENGER.  227 

at  least,  and  thus  was  able  to  compile  a  complete  description  of 
the  horse  at  every  point.  That  description  was  written  out  more 
than  twenty  years  ago,  and  in  presenting  it  now  I  will  not  change 
a  single  word.  At  the  time  it  was  written,  as  will  be  seen  from 
its  perusal,  I  had  really  no  doubt  the  horse  was  thoroughbred.  It 
will  not  be  charged,  therefore,  that  the  coarse  traits  brought  out 
in  the  description  were  influenced  in  any  degree  by  a  theory  of 
his  breeding: 

"Messenger  was  a  grey,  that  became  lighter  and  flea-bitten 
with  age.  He  was  fifteen  hands  three  inches  high,  and  for  a 
thoroughbred  his  appearance  was  coarse.  He  did  not  supply  the 
mind  with  an  idea  of  beauty,  but  he  impressed  upon  it  a  concep- 
tion of  solidity  and  power.  His  head  was  large  and  bony,  with 
a  nose  that  had  a  decided  Roman  tendency,  though  not  to  a 
marked  degree.  His  nostrils  were  unusually  large  and  flexible, 
and  when  distended  they  were  enormous.  His  eye  was  large, 
full,  very  dark  and  remarkably  brilliant.  In  this  particular  he 
does  not  appear  to  have  inherited  the  weakness  of  his  great-grand- 
sire,  Sampson.  His  ear  was  larger  than  usual  in  the  blood  horse, 
but  thin  and  tapering  and  always  active  and  expressive.  The 
windpipe  was  so  unusually  large  and  stood  out  so  much  as  a  dis- 
tinct feature  that  it  marred  what  otherwise  would  have  been  a 
gamelike  throat-latch  and  setting  on  of  the  head.  His  neck 
was  very  short  for  a  blood  horse,  but  was  not  coarse  and  thick 
like  a  bull's;  neither  did  it  rise  into  such  an  enormous  crest  as 
that  of  his  sire.  It  was  not  a  bad  neck  in  any  sense,  but  like 
Lexington's  of  our  own  day,  it  was  too  short  to  be  handsome. 
His  mane  and  foretop  were  thin  and  light.  His  withers  were 
low  and  round,  which  appears  to  have  been  a  family  characteris- 
tic in  the  male  line,  back  for  three  generations  at  least.  His 
shoulders  were  heavy  and  altogether  too  upright  for  our  ideas  of 
a  race  horse.  His  barrel  was  perfection  itself,  both  for  depth 
and  rotundity.  His  loin  was  well  arched,  broad  and  strong. 
His  hips  and  quarters  were  'incomparably  superior  to  all  others. ' 
The  column  of  the  vertebra  being  of  unusual  depth  and  strength, 
gave  the  setting  on  of  the  tail  a  distinctive,  but  elegant  character. 
The  tail  was  carried  in  fine  style;  like  the  mane,  it  was  not  in 
superabundant  quantity,  but  there  was  no  such  scantiness  as  to 
detract  from  the  beauty  and  grace  of  the  animal.  His  stifles 
were  well  spread  and  swelling,  but  there  appears  to  have  been  no 
unusual  development  at  this  point.  From  the  stifle  to  the  hock 


228  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

and  from  the  elbow  to  the  knee,  no  writer  that  we  can  now  recall 
has  given  us  any  description  of  either  length  or  strength.  We 
may,  therefore,  take  it  for  granted  that  these  points  had  no  un- 
usual development  of  muscle,  but  were  in  harmony  with  the 
general  contour  and  make-up  of  a  great  strong  horse.  His  hocks 
and  knees  were  unusually  large  and  bony,  with  all  the  members 
strong  and  clearly  defined.  The  cannon  bones  were  short  and 
flat  and  the  ligaments  back  of  them  were  very  large  and  braced  a 
good  way  off,  so  that  the  leg  was  broad  and  flat.  Mr.  Jones  says 
this  part  of  the  limb  was  of  medium  size,  but  other  writers  all 
agree  that  he  had  an  unusual  amount  of  bone  at  this  point. 
Considering  the  whole  style  and  character  of  the  horse,  and 
especially  the  character  of  his  ancestors  in  the  male  line,  and  of 
Turf,  the  [reputed]  sire  of  his  dam,  all  of  whom  were  distin- 
guished for  their  quantity  of  bone,  we  are  disposed  to  think  Mr. 
Jones'  memory  has  not  served  him  with  entire  accuracy  in  this 
particular.  The  conviction  is  reasonable  and  grows  out  of  evi- 
dence that  comes  from  every  quarter,  and  we  have  no  disposition 
to  surrender  it,  that  the  bones  of  Messenger's  limbs  were  un- 
usually large  and  strong  for  those  of  a  thoroughbred.  His 
pasterns  and  feet  were  all  that  could  be  desired,  and  as  an  evi- 
dence of  the  excellence  and  health  of  his  underpinning  several 
writers  have  put  it  on  record  that  whether  in  the  stable  or  on 
the  show  ground  he  never  was  known  to  mopingly  rest  one  leg 
by  standing  on  the  other  three,  but  was  always  prompt  and 
upright.  This  is  our  conception  of  the  form  and  appearance  of 
the  horse  as  we  have  reached  it  after  a  diligent  and  careful  study  of 
all  that  has  been  said  by  those  who  saw  him  while  he  lived. 
From  this  description  it  is  a  very  easy  matter  to  pick  out  the 
features  which  gave  him  his  coarse  and  badly  bred  appearance. 
His  big  head,  long  ears,  short  neck,  low  withers,  upright  shoul- 
ders, large  bones  and,  possibly,  coarse  hair,  complete  the  catalogue. 
From  these  features  the  purity  of  his  blood  has  been  doubted 
and  denounced,  just  as  that  of  his  sire,  his  grandsire  and  his 
great-grandsire  had  been  denounced.  The  coarseness,  the  cart- 
horse appearance  was  in  the  family,  but  it  did  not  seem  to  pre- 
vent some  of  them  from  beating  some  of  the  best  that  England  pro- 
duced in  successive  generations.  There  are  many  traditions  that 
have  been  handed  down  to  us  concerning  his  temper,  some  of 
which,  no  doubt,  have  accumulated  and  gathered  strength  and 
ferocity  in  the  years  through  which  they  have  rolled.  There 


HISTORY    OF    MESSENGER.  229 

have  been  perhaps  half  a  dozen  stories  about  his  killing  his 
keepers,  but  we  are  not  able  to  say  whether  any  one  of  them  is 
true.  It  is  known  with  certainty,  however,  that  he  was  willful 
and  vicious  and  would  tolerate  no  familiarity  from  strangers." 

The  ownership  of  Messenger,  after  he  was  transferred  from 
Philadelphia  to  New  York,  like  his  earlier  history,  seems  to  be 
very  much  muddled.  Henry  Astor,  a  New  York  butcher,  cer- 
tainly bought  him  in  the  fall  of  1793,  and  located  him  at  Philip 
Platt's,  four  miles  from  Jamaica,  on  Long  Island.  In  the  spring 
of  1796  Mr.  Cornelius  W.  Van  Ranst  bought  one-third  interest 
in  him  and  removed  him  to  Pine  Plains  in  Dutchess  County,  New 
York,  and,  without  specifying  the  time,  he  says  he  afterward 
purchased  the  remaining  two-thirds,  for  which  he  paid  two  thou- 
sand seven  hundred  and  fifty  dollars.  There  appears  to  have 
been  some  mistake  about  this,  for  in  1802  we  find  Henry  Astor,  of 
New  York,  conveying  one-third  interest  in  the  horse  to  Benjamin 
B.  Cooper,  of  Camden,  New  Jersey.  Some  other  parties  also 
claim  to  have  owned  an  interest  in  the  horse,  and  I  heard  that 
there  was  a  lawsuit  about  him  between  Astor  and  Van  Ranst. 
The  latter  claims  to  have  owned  an  interest  in  him  till  the  time 
of  his  death,  in  1808.  It  is  not  known  how  much  Mr.  Astor  paid 
for  him  when  he  bought  him,  nor  have  I  any  data  from  which  to 
•determine  the  probable  market  value  of  the  horse  except  that 
Mr.  Van  Ranst  says  he  paid  two  thousand  seven  hundred  and 
fifty  dollars  for  two-thirds  of  him.  If  we  accept  this  as  a  basis, 
he  must  have  been  valued  at  about  four  thousand  one  hundred 
.and  twenty-five  dollars.  It  is  true,  beyond  doubt,  that  for  several 
years  he  brought  to  his  owners  a  net  annual  rental  of  one  thousand 
dollars.  This  would  indicate  a  very  large  patronage  at  very  high 
prices  for  those  times.  For  the  twenty  years  of  his  stud  services 
in  this  country,  we  find  him  located  as  follows: 

1788,  at  Alexander  Clay's,  Market  Street,  Philadelphia,  at  $15 
the  season  and  $1  to  the  groom,  privilege  of  returning. 

1789,  at  Thomas  Clayton's,  Lombard  Street,  Philadelphia,  at 
$10  the  season  and  81  to  the  groom. 

1790,  at  Noah  Hunt's,  in  the  Jersies,  near  Pennington,  at  $8. 

1791,  at  "Mount  Benger,"  two  miles  from  Bristol,  Bucks  Co., 
Pa.,  at  $16. 

1792,  at  the  same  place  and  the  same  price. 

1793,  at  the  same  place  and  the  same  price. 


230  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

1794,  at  Philip  Platt's,  fifteen  miles  from  New  York  and  four 
from  Jamaica,  Long  Island,  at  $25  the  season. 

1795,  at  the  same  place  and  the  same  price,  when,  as  Mr.  Van 
Ranst  expressed  it,  "he  took  with  our  horsemen." 

1796,  at  Pine  Plains,  Dutchess  County,  N.  Y.,  where  he  covered 
106  mares  at  $30  the  season. 

1797,  I  have  no  advertisement  for  this  year,  but  it  is  probable 
he  was  at  the  same  place  at  the  same  price. 

1798,  at  Pine  Plains,  as  before,  and  the  terms  $30  for  the  season 
and  $40  to  insure. 

1799,  I    have  no  definite  trace  of  him  this  year,  but  there  are 
some  indications  he  was  in  West  Jersey. 

1800,  for  the  spring  season  he  is  not  located,  but  he  made  a, 
fall  season  at  John  Stevens'  in  Maidenhead,  Hunterdon  Co.,  N".  J. 

1801,  at  Goshen,   Orange  Co.,  N.   Y.,   and  I  have  seen  the 
book  account  of  expenses,  etc.,  while  he  was  there. 

1802,  At  Cooper's  Ferry,  opposite   Philadelphia,  Pa.,  but  the 
price  of  services  is  not  mentioned. 

1»03,  at  Townsend  Cock's,  near  Oyster  Bay,  Long  Island,  at 
$20  the  season. 

1804,  at  the  same  place  and  the  same  price. 

1805,  at    Bishop  Underbill's,  in   Westchester  Co.,  N.  Y.,  fif- 
teen miles  from  Harlem  Bridge.     Price  reduced  to  $15. 

1806,  back  again  at  Townsend  Cock's,  and  the  terms  fixed  at  $15 
for  the  season,  and  $25  to  insure. 

1807,  again  at  Bishop  Underbill's  on  the  same  terms  as  before, 
and  this  was  the  last  of  his  twenty  years'  stud  services.     It  will 
be  observed  that  the  horse  is  located  every  year  except  two,  and 
these  locations  are  determined,  not  by  tradition  or  hearsay,  but. 
by  copies  of  his  advertisements  for  each  year.     In  giving  the 
prices  charged   for  his  services  I  have  given  the  value  of  the 
guinea  or  the  pound  as  five  dollars. 

Messenger  died  January  28,  1808,  in  the  stable  of  Townsend 
Cock,  on  Long  Island,  in  his  twenty-eighth  year.  This  date  has 
been  as  familiar  to  all  intelligent  horsemen  for  the  last  forty 
years  as  any  prominent  event  in  the  history  of  the  nation.  The 
news  of  the  death  of  the  old  patriarch  spread  with  great  rapidity, 
and  soon  the  whole  countryside  was  gathered  to  see  the  last  of 
the  king  of  horses  and  to  assist  at  his  burial.  His  grave  was  pre- 
pared at  the  foot  of  a  chestnut-tree  some  distance  in  front  of 
the  house,  and  there  he  was  deposited  in  his  holiday  clothing. 


HISTORY   OF   MESSENGER.  231 

In  response  to  the  consciousness  that  a  hero  was  there  laid  away 
forever  a  military  organization  was  extemporized,  and  volley 
after  volley  by  platoons  was  fired  over  his  grave.  Some  of  the 
young  men  and  boys  who  witnessed  and  participated  in  the  cere- 
monies of  the  occasion  were  still  living  twenty  years  ago,  and  as 
they  related  the  incidents  of  the  occasion  to  me,  their  recollec- 
tions seemed  to  be  as  clear  and  bright  as  though  the  occurrence 
had  been  of  yesterday. 


CHAPTER    XIX. 

MESSENGER'S  SONS, 

Hambletonian  (Bishop's)  pedigree  not  beyond  doubt — Cadwallader  R.  Colden's 
review  of  it — Ran  successfully — Taken  to  Granville,  N.  Y. — Some  of  his 
descendants — Mambrino,  large  and  coarse  in  appearance — Failure  as  a 
runner — Good  natural  trotter — His  most  fatuous  sons  were  Abdallah, 
Almack  and  Mambrino  Paymaster — Winthrop  or  Maine  Messenger  and  his 
pedigree  and  history — Engineer  and  the  tricks  of  his  owners — Certainly  a 
son  of  Messenger — Commander — Bush  Messenger,  pedigree  and  description 
— Noted  as  the  sire  of  coach  horses  and  trotters — Potomac — Tippoo  Saib — 
Sir  Solomon — Ogden  Messenger,  dam.  thoroughbred — Mambrino  (Grey) — 
Black  Messenger — Whynot,  Saratoga,  Nestor,  Delight — Mount  Holly, 
Plato,  Dover  Messenger,  Coriander,  Fagdown,  Bright  Phoebus,  Slasher, 
Shaftsbury,  Hotspur,  Hutchinson  Messenger  and  Cooper's  Messenger- 
Abuse  of  the  name  "Messenger." 

IT  is  not  my  purpose  to  write  a  history  of  all  the  descendants 
of  Messenger,  for  that  would  fill  several  volumes  and  would  be 
simply  writing  over  again  the  trotting  and  pacing  records  of  the 
past  twenty  years.  I  will,  therefore,  limit  the  chapters  on  this 
topic  to  such  of  his  descendants  as  have  demonstrated  the  value 
and  prominence  of  their  blood,  as  a  factor,  in  the  make-up  of 
the  American  Trotter.  Naturally,  the  immediate  progeny  of 
Messenger  will  first  demand  consideration,  and  then  will  follow 
the  succeeding  generations  that  have  written  their  own  history 
in  the  official  records  of  trotting  and  pacing.  Completeness  of 
description  and  space  occupied  will  be  determined,  chiefly,  by 
the  prominence  and  historic  value  of  the  animal  under  review. 
In  this  scope  and  without  following  any  chronological  order,  I 
will  try  to  embrace  all  that  is  known  that  would  be  of  value  to 
the  student  of  trotting-horse  history. 

HAMBLETONIAX  (BISHOP'S),  originally  called  HAMILTONIAN.— 
This  was  a  dark-bay  horse  about  fifteen  hands  two  inches  higli. 
He  was  bred  by  General  Nathaniel  Coles,  of  Dosoris,  Long 
Island,  and  was  foaled  1804.  He  was  got  by  Messenger,  his  dam 
Pheasant  (the  Virginia  Mare),  said  to  be  thoroughbred,  by  imp. 
Shark  and  grandam  by  imp.  Medley.  I  first  unearthed  the 


MESSENGER'S  SONS.  233 

of  this  "Virginia  Mare"  in  the  advertisement  of  Hambletonian 
for  1814  when  he  was  owned  by  Townsend  Cock  and  standing 
that  year  at  Goshen,  New  York.  The  "Old  Turfman,"  Cadwal- 
lader  R.  Golden,  was  thoroughly  familiar  with  all  turf  subjects  in 
the  early  years  of  this  century,  and  was  the  best  turf  writer  of  his 
generation.  He  had  no  patience  or  tolerance  with  frauds  in 
pedigrees  and  always  exposed  them  without  mercy.  He  stoutly 
maintains  that  the  pedigree  of  the  "Virginia  Mare"  was  bogus, 
and,  to  use  his  own  language,  he  says: 

"  When  Hambletonian  became  a  public  stallion,  his  owners  were  in  a  dilem- 
ma; &  pedigree  was  necessary,  so  to  work  they  went,  and,  as  many  had  done 
before  and  as  many  are  doing  now,  made  one;  and  in  his  handbills  his  dam  was 
given  as  bred  in  Virginia,  and  got  by  imported  Shark,  with  a  train  of  maternal 
ancestors,  with  as  much  truth,  and  affording  as  much  ability  to  trace  it  or 
discover  the  breeder  of  the  dam,  as  though  they  had  said  hi,  cockalorum  jig.'' 

Mr.  Golden  goes  into  the  pedigree  of  this  mare  and  the  non-racing 
character  of  her  family  at  great  length,  and  it  cannot  be  denied 
that  he  has  the  whole  argument.  As  a  specimen  of  sharp  and 
interesting  turf  writing  of  that  period  and  from  that  pen,  I  must 
commend  my  readers  to  turn  to  this  article,  which  will  be  found 
in  Wallace's  Monthly,  Vol.  II.,  p.  67. 

With  the  probabilities  all  against  the  truthfulness  of  the  pedi- 
gree of  the  dam,  as  given,  it  is  certainly  true  that  he  was  a  run- 
ning horse  and  attained  distinction  in  his  day.  I  have  no  full 
list  of  his  performances  at  hand,  but  the  following  may  be  taken  as 
a  fair  summary  of  his  principal  achievements.  He  ran  at  New- 
market in  the  spring  of  1807  (then  three  years  old),  one  mile, 
beating  General  Coles'  colt  Bright  Phoebus,  Mr.  Terhune's  bay 
filly,  and  distancing  two  others.  He  also  ran,  two  days  after  the 
above  race,  four  heats  of  a  mile  each,  beating  Bright  Phoebus 
again  and  distancing  three  others.  In  the  fall  of  1808  he  ran 
five  weeks  successively,  and  the  three  last  weeks  he  won  three 
four-mile  purses,  running  the  distance  in  shorter  time  than  it 
ever  had  been  run  in  the  State  of  New  York.  I  must  say  here  that 
these  races  were  run  on  the  then  Harlem  course,  which  was  not  a 
full  mile  in  length. 

While  Hambletonian  was  on  the  turf,  Tippoo  Sultan,  a  grand- 
son of  Messenger,  beat  Bond's  First  Consul  in  a  famous  four-mile 
race,  and  Mr.  Bond  determined  that  he  would  find  a  horse  that 
would  be  able  to  lower  Tippoo  Sultan's  colors,  and  it  was  thought 


234  THE   HOUSE   OF   AMERICA. 

there  was  nothing  in  the  North  able  to  do  it  except  Miller's  Dam- 
sel, so  he  made  a  match  for  four  thousand  dollars  a  side  on  con- 
dition that  Damsel  should  prove  not  to  be  in  foal.  But  the  mare 
proving  to  be  in  foal  the  match  was  off.  He  then  took  Hamble- 
tonian  into  his  stable  and  offered  to  match  him  for  the  same 
amount  against  Tippoo  Sultan,  but  he  went  amiss  and  the  match 
was  off.  This  incident  is  here  introduced  to  show  that  whatever 
his  real  merits,  Hambletonian  had  some  reputation  as  a  running 
horse.  It  was  said  that  the  secret  of  Mr.  Colden's  hostility  to 
the  "Virginia  Mare"  and  her  descendants  was  because  those 
descendants  were  always  able  to  beat  the  descendants  of  his 
fashionably  bred  mare  Matilda.  Whatever  the  motive  in  expos- 
ing a  pedigree  that  has  never  been  fully  established,  there  is  one 
particular  and  that  the  most  important  of  all  particulars,  in 
which  Mr.  Golden  has  done  justice  to  Hambletonian.  He  says: 
" Hambletonian  got  some  excellent  roadsters,  good  trotters." 

There  seems  to  be  no  description  of  this  horse  extant  that  is 
fully  satisfactory.  For  some  seasons  he  was  in  the  hands  of  Mr. 
Daniel  T.  Cock,  who  in  1869  furnished  me  the  following:  "He 
was  a  dark  bay,  a  little  heavy  about  the  head  and  neck,  fifteen 
and  a  half  hands  high,  and  rather  an  upright  shoulder.  Back, 
loin  and  hind  quarters  as  good  as  were  ever  put  on  a  horse.  Fore 
legs  a  little  light,  but  hind  legs  strong  and  good — pretty  straight. 
He  was  a  beautiful  saddle  horse,  notwithstanding  his  head  and 
ear  were  a  little  coarse."  Other  persons  who  had  seen  him  have 
described  him  as  "a  great  strong  horse,  with  bone  and  substance 
enough  to  pull  the  plow  or  do  any  other  kind  of  drudgery."  It 
has  been  said  that  he  had  a  fine  open  trotting  gait  and  that,  in  a 
cutter  with  old  Isaac  Bishop  behind  him,  he  was  able  to  show  the 
boys  the  road. 

In  1807  he  became  the  property  of  Townsend  Cock,  of  Long 
Island,  and  he  remained  on  the  turf  till  1810,  when  he  was  put  in 
the  stud.  That  and  the  following  season  he  was  at  the  stable  of 
his  owner;  1812  at  Cornwall;  1813  at  Fishkill;  1814  at  Goshen; 
1815-16  at  Fishkill;  1817  at  White  Plains.  In  the  winter  of 
1819  Mr.  Cock  sold  him  to  Stephen  and  Smith  Germond  of  Dutch- 
ess  County,  New  York,  and  Isaac  Bishop  of  Granville,  New 
York.  The  latter  was  probably  the  real  owner,  and  the  horse 
then  became  known  as  "Bishop's  Hambletonian."  He  made 
several  seasons  in  the  region  of  Granville  and  was  back  in  Dutch- 
ess  County  1823  and  1824.  The  next  year  he  was  at  Granville — 


MESSENGER'S  SONS.  235 

1825.  He  made  one  season,  at  least,  at  Burlington,  Vermont, 
and  some  seasons  or  parts  of  seasons  at  Poultney,  Vermont.  It 
is  said  he  lived  till  1834. 

At  Wallingford,  Vermont,  he  was  bred  upon  the  "Munson 
Mare,"  said  to  be  a  daughter  of  imported  Messenger,  and  doubt- 
less either  by  him  or  one  of  his  earlier  sous,  and  the  produce 
was  Harris'  Hambletonian,  also  known  as  "The  Eemington 
Horse"  and  Bristol  Grey,  and  this  son  became  the  progenitor  of 
a  great  tribe  of  trotters,  known  as  the  "Vermont  Hamble- 
tonians,"  some  of  which  were  very  fast  pacers,  among  them  the 
famous  Hero,  the  fastest  of  his  generation.  Another  son  of 
Mr.  Bishop's  horse  was  the  Judson  Hambletonian,  that  was  the 
sire  of  the  Andrus  horse,  that  got  the  famous  Princess,  that  was 
pitted  against  Flora  Temple.  He  was  also  bred  on  his  half-sister, 
Silvertail,  by  Messenger,  and  produced  One  Eye,  a  very  fast  mare, 
the  grandam  of  Rysdyk's  Hambletonian,  and  I  have  always 
thought  that  this  combination  was  the  very  cream  of  the  pedi- 
gree of  that  great  horse.  He  was  also  bred  on  a  daughter  of  Mr. 
Coffin's  son  of  Messenger  and  produced  Whalebone,  that  was  the 
phenomenal  long-distance  trotter  of  his  generation.  His  son,  Sir 
Peter,  out  of  an  unknown  mare,  was  also  a  famous  old-time  trot- 
ter. One  of  his  daughters  was  bred  to  Coriander,  son  of  Mes- 
senger, and  the  produce  was  Topgallant,  the  fastest  horse  of  his 
time.  These  individual  enumerations  might  be  extended  in- 
definitely, but  I  have  given  enough  to  show  that  he  was  not 
merely  a  progenitor  of  trotting  speed  in  remote  generations,  but 
that  speed  came  directly  from  his  own  loins.  Another  most  sig- 
nificant fact  is  here  brought  to  light,  namely,  that  when  bred 
back  upon  the  blood  of  his  own  sire  he  achieved  his  greatest  suc- 
cesses. 

MAMBRINO. — This  great  son  of  Messenger  was  a  bright  bay 
with  a  star  and  one  white  ankle.  He  was  fully  sixteen  hands 
high,  with  great  length  of  body  and  generally  of  coarse  appear- 
ance. He  was  foaled  1806,  and  was  bred  by  Mr.  Lewis  Morris,  of 
Westchester  County,  New  York.  His  dam  was  by  imported 
Sour  Crout,  out  of  a  mare  by  imported  Whirligig,  and  she  out  of 
the  famous  Miss  Slammerkin,  that  is  a  well-known  landmark 
reaching  beyond  the  Revolution.  The  late  William  T.  Porter,  of 
the  Spirit  of  the  Times,  stoutly  maintained  that  Mambrino  was 
not  a  thoroughbred  horse,  and  his  reasons  seemed  to  rest  wholly 
upon  his  coarse  and  cart-horse  appearance.  Technically,  Mr. 


236  THE    HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

Porter  was  right,  but  the  trouble  did  not  rest  with  the  dam,  as 
he  seems  to  have  supposed,  for  I  have  seen  the  original  certificate 
of  breeding  in  the  handwriting  of  Mr.  Morris,  his  breeder,  and 
there  is  no  slip  on  that  side  of  the  pedigree.  Mr.  Morris  was  a 
prominent  breeder  and  racing  man  for  many  years  and  his  char- 
acter was  without  taint.  The  pedigree  is  a  very  long  one  and  I 
would  be  very  far  from  vouching  for  the  truth  of  the  remote 
extensions,  but  back  to  the  mare  by  Cub,  imported  by  Mr.  De 
Lancey,  who  bred  Miss  Slammerkin,  there  can  be  no  mistake. 

In  the  spring  of  1810,  then  four  years  old,  he  was  purchased 
of  his  breeder  by  Major  William  Jones,  of  Queens  County,  Long 
Island,  and  in  the  autumn  of  that  year  he  was  trained  and  ran 
for  the  two-mile  parse  at  the  old  Newmarket  Course,  Long 
Island,  and  it  is  said  gave  some  evidence  that  he  could  run,  but 
after  that  he  was  never  trained  nor  started  in  a  race,  from  which 
we  may  conclude  he  was  not  a  race  horse,  or  his  owner,  who  bred 
and  ran  his  horses,  would  have  given  him  another  trial. 

In  1811  he  was  put  in  the  stud  and  made  the  season  at  Hunt- 
ington,  Long  Island,  in  charge  of  Ebenezer  Gould.  It  is  not 
known  where  he  made  the  season  of  1812,  but  probably  in  Orange 
or  Dutchess  County.  The  years  1813-14-15  he  was  in  charge  of 
my  late  highly  esteemed  and  venerable  correspondent,  David  W. 
Jones,  on  the  borders  of  Queens  and  Suffolk  counties,  Long 
Island,  where  he  covered  about  two  hundred  and  fifty  mares. 
In  1816  he  was  in  one  of  the  river  counties,  in  1817  at  Fishkill, 
and  1818  at  Townsend  Cock's,  Long  Island.  In  later  years  he 
changed  hands  many  times,  at  from  two  hundred  to  two  hundred 
and  fifty  dollars,  and  there  is  no  published  trace  of  him  till  we 
find  that  he  made  the  seasons  of  1825  and  1829  at  Pleasant  Valley, 
Dutchess  County,  and  he  died  the  property  of  Benjamin  Ger- 
mond,  on  the  farm  of  Azariah  Arnold  in  Dutchess  County,  about 
1831. 

He  took  his  beautiful  color  from  his  dam  and  transmitted  it 
with  great  uniformity.  His  general  structure  was  after  the  Mes- 
senger model,  especially  in  the  large  bones  and  joints  of  his 
limbs.  His  head  was  long  and  bony  and  his  ears  were  large  and 
somewhat  heavy.  He  was  too  high  on  his  legs  and  his  general 
appearance  was  coarse,  all  of  which  he  transmitted.  In  speaking 
of  his  offspring  Mr.  Jones  remarks:  "When  young  they  were 
somewhat  leggy  and  lathy,  but  spirited,  stylish  and  slashing  in 
action.  When  matured,  he  must  indeed  be  fastidious  who  would 


237 

crave  another."  With  regard  to  his  gait  Mr.  Jones  uses  the 
following  very  emphatic  language:  "I  have  been  the  breeder  of 
some,  and  the  owner  of  many  good  horses,  and  with  the  best 
opportunities  of  judging,  having  ridden  him  (he  was  never  driven) 
many,  many  miles,  I  say,  with  entire  confidence,  he  was  the  best 
natural  trotter  I  ever  threw  a  leg  over.  His  walk  was  free,  fling- 
ing and  elastic;  his  trot  clear,  square  and  distinct,  with  a  beau- 
tiful roll  of  the  knee  and  great  reach  of  the  hind  leg."  In  the 
absence  of  actual  training  and  timing,  it  is  hardly  possible  to  get 
better  evidence  that  Mambrino  was  a  natural  trotter  that  might 
have  been  developed  to  a  considerable  rate  of  speed.  It  would 
be  interesting  to  know  just  why  the  horse  "never  was  driven." 
Did  he  show  an  unconquerable  aversion  to  harness,  and  did 
Abdallah  inherit  this  aversion?  This  description  of  Mambrino 's 
gait  was  written  in  1866,  and  the  writer  had  spent  a  long  lifetime 
in  an  intimate  personal  knowledge  of  many,  or  indeed  most,  of 
the  best  early  trotters  that  this  country  had  produced. 

The  only  one  of  his  immediate  progeny  that  attained  distinc- 
tion as  a  trotter  was  the  famous  Betsey  Baker.  This  mare  was 
very  prominent  among  the  best  of  her  day,  and  was  able,  on  one 
occasion  at  least,  to  beat  the  great  Topgallant,  and  in  tandem 
with  Grey  Harry  when  she  was  old  she  trotted  in  2:41f-2:43f. 
Others  of  his  progeny  were  trotters  of  some  merit,  but  none  of 
them  especially  distinguished  on  the  turf.  His  three  sons,  Abdal- 
lah, Almack  and  Mambrino  Paymaster,  are  the  bright  links  in  the 
chain  extending  from  Messenger  to  the  two-minute  trotter  that 
will  keep  his  memory  green  as  long  as  there  is  a  trotting  horse 
on  the  earth.  Abdallah  at  the  head  of  the  Hambletonians, 
Almack  at  the  head  of  the  Champions,  and  Mambrino  Paymaster 
at  the  head  of  the  Mambrino  Chiefs  embrace  the  major  portion 
of  the  great  trotters  of  this  generation. 

WINTHROP,  OR  MAINE  MESSENGER. — Perhaps  no  son  of  Mes- 
senger, not  excepting  Hambletonian  and  Mambrino,  produced  a 
more  marked  effect  upon  the  stock  of  any  part  of  the  country 
than  this  horse  did  in  the  State  of  Maine.  The  impress  he  there 
made  was  not  only  remarkable  at  the  time,  but  it  is  still  felt  and 
acknowledged  in  his  descendants  to  this  day.  There  have  been 
many  conflicting  statements  made  to  the  public  about  him  and 
his  history,  but  I  think  I  am  now  able  to  give,  in  authentic  and 
reliable  form,  all  that  is  really  known  of  his  origin  and  history. 
He  was  foaled  about  1807  and  was  among  the  last  colts  by  the 


238  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

imported  horse,  but  unfortunately  we  know  nothing  of  the  blood 
of  his  dam.  Mr.  Alvan  Hayward,  for  many  years  a  citizen  of 
Kennebec  County,  Maine,  but  more  recently  of  York,  Livingston 
County,  New  York,  says  his  dam  possessed  some  imported  blood;, 
but  as  all  his  records  and  memoranda  were  burned  up  in  1845  he 
is  not  able  to  give  the  pedigree  of  the  mare  that  produced  him. 

Mr.  Hayward  bought  the  horse  about  1817  or  1818,  in  the 
village  of  Paris,  Oneida  County,  New  York,  of  a  man  by  the 
name  of  Rice  or  Wright,  but  did  not  remember  which.  He 
took  him  to  Winthrop,  Maine,  where  he  was  first  known  as 
''Messenger,"  then  as  "Kennebec  Messenger,"  or  "Winthrop 
Messenger,"  and  when  he  became  old,  as  "Old  Messenger."  The 
earliest  contemporaneous  account  I  have  of  this  horse  is  his 
advertisement  for  the  season  of  1819,  which  I  copy  from  the- 
Hallowell  Gazette  of  May  12,  of  that  year,  and  is  as  follows: 

"  THE   VALUABLE   HORSE   MESSENGER. 

"  The  subscriber  hereby  recommends  to  the  public  and  all  who  feel  interested 
to  improve  in  the  breed  of  good  and  serviceable  horses,  the  good  horse  Mes- 
senger, that  stock  so  well  known  and  approved  of  on  Long  Island,  New  York, 
and  Pennsylvania.  Said  horse  was  raised  on  Long  Island,  and  owned  by  Mr. 
Ry lander,  a  gentleman  who  has  taken  the  greatest  pains  to  import  the  best 
breed  of  horses  that  came  to  his  knowledge.  Said  horse  is  a  silver  grey,  well 
proportioned,  of  a  large  size,  and  a  good  traveler.  Gentlemen  who  are  desirous 
of  raising  good  horses  will  do  well  to  call  and  see  for  themselves. 

"  The  Messenger  will  stand  for  the  most  part  of  the  time  in  the  village  at 
Withrop  Mills.  ALVAN  HAYWARD. 

"  Winthrop,  May  1st,  1819." 

From  the  foregoing  it  will  be  seen  that  the  new  element 
brought  out  in  the  history  of  this  horse  is  the  statement  that  he 
was  owned  at  one  time  by  Mr.  Kylander,  of  Long  Island.  There 
were  two  brothers  of  this  name,*  and  they  imported  a  great  many 
horses,  but  never  before  had  I  heard  their  names  connected  with 
Winthrop  Messenger.  This  carries  us  back  to  a  period  in  the 
history  of  the  horse  before  he  was  taken  to  Oneida  County. 

Colonel  Stanley,  a  prominent  banker  of  Augusta,  and  at  one 
time  a  leading  horseman  and  stage  proprietor,  bought  Messenger 
of  his  kinsman,  Hayward,  and  owned  him  some  seven  years.  He 
says  the  horse  was  brought  to  Maine  as  early  as  1816,  and  that 
his  Uncle  Hayward  had  certificates  that  he  was  got  by  imported 
Messenger,  out  of  a  mare  well-bred  and  part  of  imported  blood. 

In  a  communication  from  Mr.  Sanford  Howard,  who  had  been 


MESSENGER'S  SONS.  239 

prominently  connected  with  the  breeding  interests  of  the  coun- 
try for  many  years,  the  following  description  is  given: 

"  I  saw  him  several  times,  first  in  1828.  In  the  latter  years  of  his  life  he 
stood  mostly  at  Anson,  on  the  Kennebec  Kiver,  and  I  think  died  there  about 
1831  [he  died  at  Dixfieldj.  He  appeared  like  an  old  horse  when  I  first  saw 
him,  older,  perhaps,  from  being  much  afflicted  with  grease,  which  had  become 
chronic,  and  at  length  had  almost  destroyed  his  hoofs;  so  that  the  last  time  I 
saw  him  he  was  nearly  incapable  of  locomotion.  His  feet  and  legs  looked  like 
those  of  an  elephant.  This  trouble  was  transmitted  to  his  offspring  through 
several  generations  (though  not  invariably  so),  and  constituted,  perhaps,  in  con- 
nection with,  in  many  cases,  a  fiat  foot  and  low  heels,  their  greatest  defect. 

M  Mr.  Hayward  states,  in  concluding  his  letter,  that  he  has  no  doubt  the 
horse  he  took  to  Maine  was  got  by  imp.  Messenger.  The  remark  is  probably 
elicited  by  intimations  that  he  might  have  been  gotten  by  a  son  of  Messenger. 
I  presume  Mr.  Hayward's  belief  was  well  founded.  As  imported  Messenger 
did  not  die  until  the  28th  of  January,  1808,  there  is  no  discrepancy  between 
that  event  and  the  age  of  Mr.  H.'s  horse.  At  the  same  time  I  must  admit  that 
Maine  Messenger  hardly  looked  like  a  half-blood  horse.  He  was  pretty  large, 
rather  short-legged,  thick-set,  with  heavy  mane  and  tail,  very  hairy  legs,  long 
hair  on  his  jaws,  and  was  heavy  coated  (in  winter)  all  over  his  body.  These 
characteristics  were  sometimes  accounted  for  by  saying  he  was  probably  out  of 
a  Dutch  mare,  meaning  such  mares  as  the  Dutch  farmers  of  New  York  kept. 
I  never  heard  of  any  claim  being  set  up  for  his  speed  in  trotting,  and  I  pre- 
sume he  was  never  tried  at  running.  He  was  strong  and  plucky,  and  the  story 
was  told  at  Winthrop  that  on  an  occasion  when  all  the  stallions  of  the  neighbor- 
hood were  brought  out  to  be  shown,  they  were  put  to  a  troc  in  sleighs  for  half 
a  mile  or  so,  and  Messenger  was  beaten.  Whereupon  his  owner  proposed  that 
the  horses  should  each  draw  a  sled  with  six  men  on  it  up  to  Winthrop  hill, 
and  be  timed.  It  was  done,  and  Messenger  beat  them  all.  I  think  the  first  of 
his  offspring  that  became  noted  for  fast  trotting  was  a  gelding  called  Lion, 
taken  to  Boston  by  a  well-known  horse  dealer  by  the  name  of  Hodges,  of 
Hallowell,  Maine.  He  was  sold,  I  think,  for  four  hundred  dollars,  which 
made  quite  a  sensation  among  the  Kennebec  farmers  who  had  any  stock  of  the 
same  sort.  I  do  not  recollect  the  rate  of  speed  this  horse  showed,  but  a  mile 
in  three  minutes  was  then  considered  wonderful,  and  probably  this  was  about 
his  rate.  Other  horses  of  the  stock  were  soon  brought  out  as  fast  travelers.  I 
remember  a  friend  of  mine  showing  me  some  young  horses  he  was  training, 
and  I  rode  with  him  after  several  of  them.  They  were  natural  trotters,  and 
would  do  nothing  but  trot,  even  under  severe  applications  of  the  whip.  But  I 
think  the  second  generation  from  Mr.  Hayward's  horse  were  generally  faster 
trotters  than  the  first.  They  were  also  generally  handsomer  horses,  not  so 
rough  looking.  Nearly  all  the  horses  of  this  stock  which  have  acquired  a 
reputation  in  Massachusetts,  New  York,  etc. ,  as  fast  trotters,  had  not  more 
than  a  quarter  of  the  blood  of  the  horse  that  Mr.  Hayward  took  to  Maine,  and 
consequently  had  not  more  than  an  eighth  of  the  blood  of  imported  Messenger. 

"  The  mares  that  produced  these  horses  were  of  no  particular  blood. 
Various  stallions  had  been  kept  in  that  section.  Morgans  from  New  Hamp- 


240  THE    HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

shire  and  Vermont,  with  an  occasional  change  to  the  French  Canadians,  and 
now  and  then  a  quarter  or  half  bred  horse  from  New  York  or  New  Jersey. " 

This  excellent  communication  from  Mr.  Howard  is  especially 
valuable,  as  the  conclusions  drawn  by  an  accurate  and  competent 
observer  from  a  personal  acquaintance  with  the  original  horse 
and  his  progeny.  There  are  some  inferences,  however,  that  may 
be  drawn  from  Mr.  Howard's  letter  that  would  be  unjust  to  this 
distinguished  animal.  His  general  coarse  appearance,  in  con- 
nection with  which  Mr.  H.  says,  "he  hardly  looked  like  a  half 
bred  horse,"  was  a  prominent  feature  in  the  family.  Mambrino, 
a  very  high-bred  son  of  old  Messenger,  was  very  coarse,  and  the 
same  remark  was  often  made  about  him.  The  quantity  and 
length  of  his  coat  in  the  winter  of  his  old  age  are  not  conclusive 
against  his  pretensions  to  a  large  share  of  good  and  pure  blood. 
They  are  the  results  oftentimes  of  neglect  and  ill  health.  It  is 
somewhere  stated  that  the  famous  Sir  Archy  before  he  died 
looked  exceedingly  shaggy,  his  hair  being  fully  three  inches  long. 
Mr.  Howard  expresses  the  opinion  that  "the  second  generation 
from  Mr.  Hayward's  horse  were  generally  faster  trotters  than  the 
first."  In  many  instances  this,  no  doubt,  is  true,  for  it  would 
be  altogether  contrary  to  the  uniform  laws  which  govern  these 
things  if  development  and  use  did  not  strengthen  and  intensify 
the  instinct  to  trot  in  successive  generations.  If  Mr.  Howard  is 
right,  and  we  do  not  doubt  he  is,  the  increased  capacity  did  not 
grow  out  of  the  dilution  of  the  blood,  but  out  of  the  strengthen- 
ing of  the  instinct  by  culture  and  use.  At  the  time  Mr.  Howard 
made  this  remark  he  evidently  did  not  know  that  the  famous 
old-time  trotters,  Daniel  D.  Tompkins  and  Fanny  Pullen,  were 
both  immediately  from  the  loins  of  Winthrop  Messenger.  In 
their  day  these  two  were  classed  among  the  best  and  fastest  trot- 
ters that  the  world  had  then  produced.  The  facts  that  both 
these  animals  were  the  immediate  progeny  of  Winthrop  Messen- 
ger were  never  brought  to  light  for  many  years,  and  all  I  will  say 
about  them  now  is  that  they  do  not  rest  on  shadowy  traditions  or 
suppositions,  but  are  fully  and  circumstantially  established. 

In  a  letter  written  by  Mr.  Hayward,  May  12,  1852,  in  speaking 
of  the  useful  and  everyday  qualities  of  this  horse's  progeny, 
he  used  the  following  language: 

' '  The  stock  produced  by  that  horse  I  consider  superior,  as  combining  more 
properties  useful  in  a  horse  than  any  other  stock  I  have  ever  been  acquainted 


MESSENGER'S  SONS.  241 

with,  being  good  for  draft,  for  carriage,  for  travel,  for  parade,  or  any  place 
where  horses  are  required.  They  had  great  bottom  and  strength,  and  were  of 
hardy  constitution.  There  are  some  horses  in  this  town  twenty -two  years  old, 
that  were  by  a  son  of  Winthrop  Messenger,  which  I  brought  with  me  when  I 
left  Maine.  They  have  always  been  accustomed  to  draw  the  plow  and  to  per- 
form other  hard  labor,  and  yet  they  have  the  appearance  of  young  horses,  and 
will  now  do  more  service  than  many  horses  of  seven  or  eight  years  old." 

Among  the  several  sons  of  imported  Messenger  whose  names 
-are  conspicuous  as  the  progenitors  of  great  tribes  of  the  most 
distinguished  trotters  I  know  of  no  one  entitled  to  a  higher 
place  on  the  roll  of  fame,  all  things  considered,  than  this  one 
that  went  to  Maine,  and  there  laid  a  foundation  that  has  made 
the  State  famous  throughout  the  length  and  breadth  of  the  land 
for  the  speed  and  stoutness  of  its  trotting  horses. 

With  such  noted  performers  from  his  own  loins  as  Fanny 
Pullen  and  Daniel  D.  Tompkins,  and  in  the  next  generation  the 
famous  Zachary  Taylor,  this  horse  made  about  the  best  showing 
of  all  the  sons  of  Messenger,  but  as  his  line  failed  to  produce  a 
Kysdyk's  Hambletonian  or  a  Mambrino  Chief,  it  dropped  to  a 
place  somewhat  removed  from  the  front  of  the  procession. 

ENGINEER  was  a  grey  horse,  about  sixteen  hands  high  and  very 
elegant  in  his  form,  style  and  proportions.  The  earliest  account 
we  have  of  him  is  in  the  spring  of  1816,  when  he  was  advertised 
in  TJie  Long  Island  Star  to  stand  at  the  stable  of  Daniel  Seely, 
near  Suffolk  Court  House,  and  at  Jericho,  in  Queens  County. 
He  was  in  charge  of  Thomas  Jackson,  Jr.,  generally  designated 
as  "Long  Tom."  He  was  then  well  advanced  in  years,  but  no 
attempt  was  made  to  give  his  age.  Mr.  Daniel  T.  Cock,  in 
charge  of  Duroc  and  one  or  two  other  stallions,  was  then  in  sharp 
competition  with  Engineer,  and  he  assures  me  he  was  a  horse  of 
large  size,  great  share  of  bone  and  sinew,  most  elegant  form,  and 
a  fine  mover.  His  elegant  appearance  was  so  captivating  that  he 
was  a  very  troublesome  competitor. 

The  advertisement  referred  to  contains  the  following  very 
unsatisfactory  paragraph  relating  to  his  pedigree,  viz.,  "The 
manner  he  came  into  this  country  is  such  that  I  cannot  give  an 
account  of  his  pedigree,  but  his  courage  and  activity  show  the 
purity  of  his  blood,  which  is  much  better  than  the  empty  sound 
of  a  long  pedigree."  This  was  a  most  unexpected  discovery,  for 
I  had  always  understood  that  Engineer  was  a  son  of  Messenger 
and  never  had  heard  of  this  mystery  before.  It  is  here  intimated 


242  THE   HORSE   OF  AMERICA. 

that  the  horse  was  imported,  and  the  story  that  Jackson  told  was 
that  he  was  brought  from  England  to  Canada  by  a  British  officer, 
and  by  some  surreptitious  means  found  his  way  from  Canada  to 
Long  Island.  What  appears  to  be  the  real  history  of  the  horse, 
and  the  version  accepted  afterward  by  everybody  on  the  island, 
will  be  found  in  the  following  extract  from  a  letter  written  by 
David  W.  Jones,  February  28,  1870.  He  says: 

"  I  can  well  account  for  Mr.  Cock's  recollections  of  the  history  of  the  first 
Engineer.  Thomas  Jackson  and  George  Tappan,  noted  owners  and  keepers  of 
stallions  on  Long  Island  and  in  the  counties  of  Orange  and  Dutchess,  in  the 
course  of  their  peregrinations  met  with  a  person  in  possession  of  this  horse, 
who  offered  him  for  sale.  Impressed  with  his  fine  appearance  and  .pedigree, 
they  at  once  entered  into  negotiations  for  his  purchase,  and  finally  obtained 
him  at  so  low  a  price  as  to  cause  strong  suspicions  that  he  was  not  honestly  in 
his  vendor's  possession.  They,  however,  determined  to  take  the  chances,  and 
at  once  brought  him  to  Long  Island,  their  place  of  residence,  and  determined 
on  what  they  deemed  a  harmless  representation  in  regard  to  his  history;  for 
this  they  had  several  motives.  First,  Messenger  stallions  were  then  very 
numerous  on  Long  Island;  their  blood  coursed  in  the  veins  of  nearly  every 
brood  mare.  Secondly,  imported  stallions  were  much  desired,  and  by  a  little 
added  fiction  they  could  give  him  considerable  eclat,  and  thirdly,  in  case  of  his 
having  been  unjustly  obtained  this  would  afford  the  best  means  of  disguise. 
Accordingly  they  represented  him  as  having  been  imported  from  England  to 
Canada  and  ridden  in  the  army  by  Gen.  Brock,  who,  in  an  engagement  with  our 
troops,  was  shot  and  killed.  The  horse,  escaping  into  our  lines,  was  secured 
by  our  soldiers  and  brought  to  the  State  of  New  York.  On  these  representa- 
tions they  claimed  to  have  purchased  him.  No  pedigree,  as  I  recollect,  was 
attempted  to  be  given,  and  though  many  doubted  the  truth  of  this  statement, 
there  was  no  evidence  to  controvert  it.  For  a  length  of  time  this  story  was 
adhered  to;  but  after  several  years,  when  all  fears  of  difficulty  had  subsided, 
they  acknowledged  the  deception.  Mr.  Tappan,  who  resided  but  a  few  miles 
from  me,  was  a  man  of  more  than  ordinary  candor  and  fairness,  for  one  of  his 
position  and  employment.  I  knew  him  well,  and  occasionally  rendered  him  a 
favor  by  preparing  his  horse  bills.  On  one  of  these  occasions,  at  my  house,  he 
gave  a  full  and  particular  statement  of  the  whole  affair.  Some  of  the  details 
have  escaped  me,  but  the  essential  facts  are  distinctly  recollected.  The  owner, 
with  Engineer  in  possession,  was  met  at  some  public  place  and  the  purchase 
completed,  and  this  statement  then  made,  'that  he  had  become  involved  in  debt, 
and  that  his  creditor  had  begun  a  prosecution,  with  a  view  to  levy  on  the  horse, 
the  only  property  he  possessed,  and  he  was  determined  not  to  lose  all.'  This 
was  certainly  enough  to  arouse  their  suspicions  with  regard  to  his  history.  He 
declared  the  horse  was  bred  and  raised  in  Pennsylvania  and  that  he  was  got 
by  imported  Messenger.  Whether  any  further  pedigree  was  given  is  not 
recollected.  He  was  at  this  time  (1814)  a  horse  considerably  advanced  in  years 
and  perfectly  white.  Mr.  Tappan  also  told  me  that  he  had  afterward  traced 
the  horse,  and  was  entirely  satisfied  of  the  former  owner's  veracity.  I  will 


MESSENGER'S  SONS. 

not  apologize  for  tbe  length  of  this  statement,  being  desirous  of  giving  you  all 
the  information  here  possessed  and  probably  all  that  can  now  be  obtained." 

I  am  not .  aware  that  in  the  past  sixty  years  any  question  has 
ever  been  raised  as  to  the  truth  of  the  universally  accepted  state- 
ment that  Engineer  was  a  true  son  of  Messenger,  and  I  would 
not  have  disturbed  it  now,  nor  thought  of  doing  so,  had  it  not 
been  for  that  remarkable  advertisement  discovered  in  the  obscure 
Long  Island  paper.  That  was  contemporaneous  history,  how- 
ever, and  it  must  either  be  explained  or  accepted.  The  question 
has  been  examined  down  to  the  bottom  by  one  of  the  most  con- 
scientious and  capable  men  of  his  generation,  in  this  department 
of  knowledge.  His  verdict  has  been  accepted  as  the  truth  by  all 
parties  of  that  day,  and  I  cannot  reject  it. 

It  is  not  known  that  any  of  his  immediate  progeny  attained 
distinction  on  the  trotting  turf.  Several  of  his  sons  bore  his 
name  in  the  stud  and  while  their  blood  seemed  to  be  helpful  in 
the  right  direction,  only  one  of  them  made  any  mark  as  a  sire  of 
speed,  and  that  was  the  horse  known  as  Lewis'  Engineer,  the 
sire  of  the  world  beater,  Lady  Suffolk.  Burdick's  Engineer, 
another  son,  was  taken  to  Washington  County,  New  York,  and 
got  the  dam  of  the  famous  Princess,  which  produced  the  great 
Happy  Medium.  In  all  these  instances  there  was  commingling 
with  other  strains  from  Messenger. 

COMMANDER. — This  was  a  grey  horse,  fully  sixteen  hands  high 
and  of  massive  proportions.  He  was  a  son  of  imported  Messen- 
ger and  out  of  a  mare  by  imported  Kockingham.  This  Rocking- 
ham  was  not  a  thoroughbred  horse.  Commander  was  bred  in 
Bucks  County,  Pennsylvania,  and  found  his  way  to  Long  Island 
about  1812,  where  he  was  liberally  patronized.  His  name  fre- 
quently occurs  among  the  remote  crosses  of  good  pedigrees,  but 
his  fame  rests  wholly  on  the  progeny  of  his  son,  Young  Com- 
mander, who  was  the  sire  of  Screwdriver,  Screws,  Bull  Calf  and 
other  good  ones.  This  horse  Young  Commander  was  sometimes 
called  "Bull"  and  sometimes  "American  Commander." 

MESSENGER,  (Busn's),  generally  known  as  BUSH  MESSENGER. 
This  son  of  Messenger  was  bred  by  James  Dearin,  of  Dutchess 
County,  New  York,  and  was  foaled  1807.  His  dam  was  a  Vir- 
ginia mare,  named  Queen  Ann,  by  Celer,  son  of  imported  Janus, 
and  out  of  a  mare  by  Skipwith's  Figure,  son  of  imported  Figure, 
and  she  out  of  a  mare  imported  by  Colonel  Miland,  of  Virginia. 
This  pedigree  was  not  accepted  without  some  misgivings,  but  as. 


THE   HOKSE   OF   AMERICA. 

it  was  possible  and  as  it  had  been  indorsed  sixty  years  ago  by 
Cadwallader  R.  Golden  and  published  before  that  by  Mr.  Dearin,  I 
am  disposed  to  accept  it  as  reliable. 

He  was  sixteen  hands  high,  a  light  grey,  becoming  white  with 
age.  He  was  excellent  in  form  and  probably  the  most  handsome 
and  attractive  of  all  the  sons  of  Messenger.  The  first  public 
notice  we  have  of  him,  he  was  advertised  at  the  stable  of  his 
breeder,  six  miles  south  of  Poughkeepsie,  in  1813.  Soon  after 
this  he  became  the  property  of  Philo  C.  Bush,  and  this  was  the 
first  horse,  he  says,  that  he  ever  owned.  This  Mr.  Bush  was  a 
noted  "character"  in  his  day.  From  early  manhood,  through 
good  and  evil  report,  and  until  he  died  a  very  old  man  in  poverty 
and  want,  he  was  a  habitue  of  the  race  track.  He  knew  all  about 
race  horses  and  their  breeding,  and  he  could  prattle  pedigrees 
from  morning  till  night.  Added  to  this  knowledge  which  his 
life  pursuits  had  placed  in  his  possession,  he  was  endowed  with  a 
most  vivid  imagination  which  was  brought  into  the  most  active 
play  whenever  he  found  it  necessary.  To  maintain  his  "reputa- 
tion" it  seemed  to  be  a  necessity  that  he  should  be  able  to  extend 
all  pedigrees  laid  before  him  and  give  the  remote  crosses,  whether 
he  knew  anything  about  them  or  not.  He  was  the  author  of  the 
running  pedigree  given  to  the  dam  of  Major  Winfield — Edward 
Everett,  son  of  Hambletonian — and  on  it  money  was  won  in  a 
bet.  An  investigation  of  just  two  minutes  disclosed  the  facts 
that  by  established  and  known  dates  the  whole  thing  was  utterly 
impossible.  He  was  literally  a  very  "racy"  raconteur,  but  his 
reminiscences  soon  became  tedious,  notwithstanding  their  bril- 
liancy, and  it  was  always  important  to  have  a  call  to  some  busi- 
ness that  cut  off  further  entertainment  from  his  repertoire. 

Mr.  Bush  says  he  paid  one  thousand  seven  hundred  and  forty 
dollars  and  a  silver  watch  for  this  horse,  and  with  him  he  got  an 
elegant  suit  of  clothing  that  had  belonged  to  imported  Express. 
It  is  said  that  he  never  ran  but  one  race  and  that  was  at  Pine 
Plains,  in  which  he  distanced  all  his  competitors  in  the  first  heat. 
In  1816  Mr.  Bush  kept  him  at  Kinderhook;  1817  at  Kinderhook 
and  Schodack;  1818  at  Kinderhook  and  Albany;  1819-20  at 
Utica.  In  the  autumn  of  1820  he  was  sold  to  Dr.  Millington,  of 
Crooked  Lake,  Herkimer  County,  and  he  was  kept  there  1821- 
22.  He  was  then  sold  to  Edward  Reynolds,  of  East  Bloomfield, 
where  he  was  kept  three  or  four  years,  after  which  he  made  one 
or  more  seasons  at  Le  Roy,  and  he  died  at  East  Bloomfield  in 


MESSENGER'S  soxs.  245 

July,  1829.  This  horse  had  probably  more  trotting  speed  than 
any  of  the  other  sons  of  Messenger.  Mr.  Bush  assured  me  that 
he  could  trot  very  fast  for  a  horse  of  that  day,  and  when  led  by 
the  side  of  another  horse  he  could  beat  three  minutes  very  easily, 
but  as  we  have  to  take  Mr.  Bush's  assertions  cum  grano  salis,  we 
fortunately  have  very  reliable  testimony  of  contemporaneous  date 
and  from  a  source  wholly  disinterested.  I  have  before  me  a 
letter  written  by  Judge  J.  Porter,  of  East  Bloomfield,  dated  June 
4,  1828,  in  reply  to  inquiries  from  some  correspondent  about  the 
horse,  his  terms,  etc.  He  writes  as  follows: 

"  I  should  think  he  was  a  very  swift  trotter  from  what  I  have  seen,  and  very 
sprightly  and  nearly  white.  He  has  got  a  great  number  of  fine  colts  in  this 
town  which  are  three  years  old;  and  the  probability  of  their  drawing  on  the 
old  horse's  business  is  the  reason  of  his  being  removed  to  Le  Roy  and  Batavia." 

Whether  Judge  Porter  was  a  horseman  or  not  he  certainly 
reflected,  in  this  remark  which  I  have  emphasized,  the  leading 
quality  for  which  Bush  Messenger  was  distinguished  in  that  region 
and  in  that  day. 

Although  he  was  certainly  a  very  fast  natural  trotter,  it  is  not 
known  that  he  was  ever  trained  an  hour  in  his  life,  neither  is  it 
known  that  any  fast  or  trained  trotters  ever  came  from  his  loins. 
This  was  the  period  of  fast  mail  coaches  running  from  Albany  to 
Buffalo,  and  as  the  old  proprietors  of  those  great  lines  were 
pushed  westward  from  State  to  State  until  they  finally  were 
driven  across  the  Mississippi,  I  have  many  times  heard  them  talk 
of  the  great  slashing  grey  Messenger  teams  that  would  carry  their 
coaches  along  at  ten  miles  an  hour,  and  lament  that  there  were 
no  such  horses  nowadays.  There  were  other  sons  of  Messenger 
and  many  grandsons,  all  known  as  "Messengers,"  but  as  a  pro- 
genitor of  horses  suited  to  the  stage  coach  this  particular  one 
that  broke  his  neck  in  trying  to  get  out  of  his  inclosure  was  the 
premier.  He  probably  came  nearer  filling  the  place  in  this 
country  that  his  grandsire  filled  in  England — English  Mambrino 
— than  any  other  one  of  the  tribe,  for  we  can  truly  say  of  him,  as 
Pick  said  of  his  grandsire,  "from  his  blood  the  breed  of  horses 
for  the  coach  was  brought  nearly  to  perfection." 

POTOMAC  was  a  bright  bay,  fifteen  and  a  half  hands  high,  and 
was  bred  by  Daniel  Youngs,  of  Oyster  Bay,  Long  Island.  He 
was  foaled  1796  and  got  by  imported  Messenger;  dam  by  imported 
Figure;  grandam  by  Bashaw.  He  was  put  on  the  turf  in  the 


246  THE   HOKSE   OF    AMEKICA. 

spring  of  1799  and  was  a  respectable  race  horse  at  short  distances. 
He  ran  against  and  beat  some  of  the  best  of  his  day.  He  was  on 
the  turf  about  three  years.  In  the  midst  of  his  racing  career  he 
was  purchased  by  Mr.  Van  Eanst  for  five  hundred  pounds.  In 
1802  he  was  owned  by  Major  William  Jones,  of  Cold  Spring  Har- 
bor, and  made  some  seasons  there.  In  1806  he  was  at  New 
Windsor,  Orange  County,  New  York.  In  1808  he  was  in  charge 
of  Thomas  Jackson,  at  Eahway,  New  Jersey,  and  1811  at  Cross- 
wicks,  near  Trenton,  New  Jersey.  It  is  probable  he  died  about 
this  time,  as  we  find  no  further  trace  of  him.  Most  of  his  stock 
were  bays,  of  good  size,  and  very  salable  animals.  Nothing  can 
now  be  recalled  that  connects  him  with  any  of  the  trotting  strains 
coming  from  his  sire.  He  was  not  strictly  running-bred  on  the 
side  of  his  dam. 

TIPPOO  SAIB  was  a  bay  horse  with  one  white  foot  and  was  fully 
sixteen  hands  high,  with  plenty  of  bone.  He  was  foaled  1795, 
got  by  imported  Messenger;  dam  Mr.  Thompson's  imported 
mare  by  Northumberland;  grandam  by  Snap,  etc.  His  fine  size 
and  elegant  pedigree  made  Tippoo  Saib  a  very  desirable  horse  to 
breed  to,  but  for  some  cause  he  did  not  appear  much  on  the  turf. 
He  ran  a  few  races  and  went  into  the  stud  early,  in  the  neigh- 
borhood of  Trenton,  New  Jersey,  and  in  the  following  year  was 
at  Goshen,  Fishkill,  and  Pine  Plains,  New  York.  My  impression 
is  he  was  then  returned  to  West  Jersey  and  Bucks  County,  Penn- 
sylvania, where  he  was  probably  owned  in  his  latter  days.  His 
sons  Tippoo  Sultan,  Financier  and  others,  acquired  great  fame  on 
the  turf.  His  connection  with  the  trotting  lines  of  descent  is 
very  distinct,  but  not  very  prominent. 

SIR  SOLOMON  was  got  by  imported  Messenger;  dam  Camilla  by 
Cephalus;  grandam  Camilla  by  imported  Fearnought  and  out  of 
imported  Calista,  etc.  He  was  foaled  about  1800,  bred  by  General 
Gunn,  of  Georgia,  who  seems  to  have  kept  Camilla  and  perhaps 
others  in  the  North  for  the  purpose  of  breeding.  The  pedigree 
on  the  side  of  this  dam  is  an  excellent  one  and  would  seem  to 
justify  the  owner  in  seeking  to  get  the  best  crosses  possible  into 
his  stud.  When  five  years  old  he  was  sold  to  Mr.  Bond,  of  Phila- 
delphia, for  two  thousand  dollars.  His  races  were  numerous  and 
often  successful,  beating  some  of  the  best  horses  of  his  day,  and 
among  them  the  famous  Miller's  Damsel,  also  by  Messenger, 
over  the  Harlem  Course  in  heats  of  four  miles.  Not  much  is 
known  of  his  stud  services,  and  he  seems  to  have  been  kept 


247 

several  years  in  Union  County,  New  Jersey.  He  seems  to  have 
labored  under  the  disadvantage  of  having  a  greater  horse  of  the 
same  name — Badger's  Sir  Solomon  by  Tickle  Toby — in  competi- 
tion with  him,  and  thus  the  son  of  Tickle  Toby  would  steal  many 
&  chaplet  from  the  brow  of  his  namesake,  the  son  of  Messenger. 

OGDEX  MESSENGER  was  a  grey  horse,  foaled  1806,  got  by  im- 
ported Messenger;  dam  Katy  Fisher,  by  imported  Highflyer; 
grandam  a  mare  imported  by  H.  X.  Cruger  in  1786,  by  Cottager; 
great-grandam  by  Trentham;  great-great-gran  dam  by  Henricus; 
great-great-great-grandam  by  Eegulus.  The  pedigree  of  this 
dam  is  correct,  and  she  was  doubtless  entitled  to  rank  as  thor- 
oughbred. This  horse  was  bred  by  Mr.  Cruger,  and  at  three 
years  old  was  sold  to  David  Ogden,  and  that  summer  he  was  pas- 
tured on  the  farm  of  Major  William  Jones,  of  Long  Island,  from 
whose  books  we  have  the  foregoing  facts.  Mr.  David  W.  Jones 
remarks:  ''I  retain  a  perfect  recollection  of  him.  He  was  at 
that  time  a  large  overgrown  colt,  not  particularly  ugly  nor  ex- 
ceedingly coarse,  but  having  no  special  beauty  nor  finish.  I  can- 
not better  describe  him  than  to  say  he  was  a  coarse  pattern  of  a 
fine  horse,  with  marked  traits  of  his  lineage."  Mr.  Jones  evi- 
dently saw  him  at  his  worst  age  and  before  he  fully  reached  his 
maturity. 

Judge  Odgen,  his  owner,  was  a  large  landholder  in  St.  Law- 
rence County,  New  York,  and  in  the  spring  of  1810  he  removed 
from  New  Jersey  to  an  island  of  eight  hundred  acres  in  the  St. 
Lawrence  river,  opposite  the  village  of  Haddington,  and  took  the 
horse,  then  four  years  old,  with  him.  It  is  not  known  that  he 
ever  ran  a  race  for  money,  and  it  is  not  probable  he  ever  did,  for 
it  was  his  owner's  aim  and  object  to  improve  the  stock  of  the 
country  as  well  as  his  own,  in  which  he  was  successful.  After 
five  or  six  years  he  was  taken  to  Lowville  in  Lewis  County,  and 
made  several  seasons  there  in  charge  of  Charles  Bush,  and  from 
this  fact  he  came  to  be  known  there,  locally,  as  Bush  Messenger. 
Thus  it  happened  that  there  were  two  SODS  of  imported  Messen- 
ger in  the  State  of  New  York  at  the  same  time,  and  both  known 
as  Bush  Messenger,  and  to  these  we  might  add  a  grandson  and  a 
great-grandson  in  the  State  of  Maine,  and  at  later  date  both 
named  "Bush  Messenger."  It  was  at  one  time  supposed  that 
Mr.  Ogden's  horse  while  at  Lowville  became  the  sire  of  the 
famous  Tippoo  of  Canada  that  became  the  head  of  a  very  valua- 
ble tribe  of  ti  otters  and  pacers,  but  later  developments  showed 


248  THE    HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

that  this  was  a  mistake.  (He  appears  to  have  alternated  in  his* 
services  between  Lewis  and  Jefferson  counties,  but  whether 
weekly  or  yearly  I  cannot  state.  He  was  taken  to  Lowville  as 
early  as  1815  and  was  there  five  or  six  years.) 

The  facts  about  this  horse,  have  been  developed  from  much 
correspondence  with  different  parties,  but  more  especially  from 
Mr.  V.  Sheldon,  of  Canton,  New  York,  and  from  Mr.  P.  F. 
Daniels,  of  Prescott,  Ontario.  Both  men  knew  the  horse  person- 
ally, and  Mr.  Daniels  was  seventy-five  years  old  when  he  wrote. 
He  still  had  a  very  clear  recollection  of  the  horse  in  his  appear- 
ance and  style  of  action.  In  describing  him  he  says:  "He  was 
peculiarly  marked  about  his  hocks  and  knees,  having  a  series  of 
dark  rings  about  his  limbs,  continuing  at  intervals  down  to  his 
hoofs,  and  many  of  his  sons  and  daughters  were  marked  the 
same  way."  Having  ridden  him  many  times  he  says:  "He 
had  a  long  flinging  step  and  was  a  fast  trotter.  His  action  was 
high  and  not  easy  to  the  rider,  and  he  could  not  widen  behind 
as  some  of  our  modern  trotters." 

When  Mr.  Daniels  was  a  young  man  he  was  engaged  in  carry- 
ing the  mail,  and  in  March,  1821,  he  believes  it  was,  Judge 
Ogden  gave  him  an  order  to  bring  the  horse  home  from  Lewis- 
County.  He  led  him  all  the  way  behind  his  mail  conveyance 
and  delivered  him  safely  to  young  Mr.  Ogden,  who  gave  him  to- 
an  Irish  groom  named  Daley,  and  Daley  remarked  he  would  soon 
make  him  look  like  another  horse.  That  night  he  gave  him  an 
overfeed  of  corn  and  he  died  of  colic.  He  was  never  advertised 
while  at  home  and  he  was  not  very  liberally  patronized.  The 
Freemans  and  the  Archibalds,  however,  Mr.  Daniels  says,  bred 
to  him  largely.  His  stock  were  good  and  many  of  them  excel- 
lent, especially  those  descended  through  his  sons  Blossom  and 
Freeman's  Messenger. 

MAMBRINO  (GREY). — This  son  of  Messenger  was  foaled  about 
1800,  his  dam  was  by  Pulaski,  grandam  by  Wilkes;  great-gran- 
dam  by  True  Briton.  He  was  bred  by  Benjamin  C.  Ridgeway, 
near  Mount  Holly,  New  Jersey.  In  1807  he  stood  at  Flemington 
under  the  name  of  Fox  Hunter.  He  was  purchased  by  Eichard 
Isaac  Cooper,  who  resold  him  to  William  Atkinson  for  about  one- 
thousand  two  hundred  dollars.  He  was  a  flea-bitten  grey,  mane 
and  tail  white,  handsome  and  stylish,  about  sixteen  hands  high, 
head  medium  size,  and  a  good,  well-formed  horse  at  every  point, 
except  his  feet,  which  were  big  and  flat.  He  was  probably  never 


MESSENGER'S  SONS.  249 

harnessed  and  was  a  very  popular  stallion  in  Salem  and  adjoin- 
ing counties  for  many  years.  Mr.  Atkinson  was  a  very  prom- 
inent and  influential  member  of  the  Society  of  Friends,  and 
4 'Billy"  Atkinson  was  always  a  welcome  guest  as  he  traveled 
through  Salem,  Gloucester,  and  Burlington  counties  with  his 
horse,  and  his  genial  good  humor  made  him  as  popular  as  his 
horse.  He  always  claimed  great  speed  for  his  horse,  but  owing 
to  his  position  in  the  society  he  never  could  gratify  his  friends 
by  showing  it.  When  his  offspring  came  into  service  they  were 
not  only  performers  of  great  merit  on  the  road  and  the  course, 
but  they  had  bone  and  substance  that  fitted  them  for  every  kind 
of  labor  required  of  them.  All  the  Quakers  had  Mambrinos  and 
nothing  else,  after  "Billy"  Atkinson  and  his  horse  had  been 
among  them  a  few  years.  Some  of  his  descendants  attained  to 
great  local  fame  as  trotters  and  some  did  well  as  runners.  He 
was  a  very  valuable  horse  and  left  a  wonderfully  numerous  and 
valuable  offspring. 

BLACK  MESSENGER. — Among  all  the  progeny  of  Messenger, 
this  is  the  only  one  that  I  can  now  recall  that  was  black.  He 
was  bred  by  William  Haselton,  of  Burlington  County,  New 
Jersey,  and  out  of  a  mare  highly  prized  in  the  Haselton  family, 
but  her  blood  cannot  now  be  traced.  He  was  foaled  in  1801  and 
on  the  death  of  Mr.  Haselton  in  1804  he  was  sold  to  Charles  or 
Richard  Wilkins  of  Evesham,  ten  miles  from  Camden,  New 
Jersey,  who  owned  him  till  he  died  at  an  advanced  age.  As  the 
birth  of  this  horse  is  fixed  by  documentary  evidence  at  1801  it  sug- 
gests that  Messenger  was  kept  in  Burlington  County,  New 
Jersey,  the  unplaced  season  of  1800.  Still  as  he  was  at  Lawrence- 
ville  in  the  fall  season  of  1800  it  is  possible  the  mare  was  sent  to 
him  there.  He  was  full  sixteen  hands  high  and  possessed  great 
muscular  development  and  strength  of  bone.  He  was  not  hand- 
some, but  his  figure  and  style  were  very  commanding.  In  his 
day  he  was  regarded  as  one  of  the  best  natural  trotters  ever  in 
Burlington  or  Gloucester  counties.  This  was  not  the  claim  of  his 
owner  merely,  but  the  unprejudiced  opinion  of  all  the  horsemen 
who  knew  him.  His  stock  were  very  highly  prized  as  hor&es 
suited  to  all  purposes  and  especially  for  fast  road  work.  Some 
of  them  were  greatly  distinguished  locally  as  fast  trotters,  and 
among  them  was  Nettle,  the  dam  of  the  famous  Dutchman,  that 
was  the  greatest  trotter  of  his  day. 

WHYNOT  MESSENGER,  Pizzant's  Messenger,  Austin's  Messen- 


250  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

ger,  and  Cousin's  Messenger  were  all  sons  of  Messenger  and  got 
by  him  while  he  was  in  West  Jersey,  but  as  nothing  has  been 
developed  concerning  their  maternal  breeding  nor  the  character 
of  their  progeny,  I  will  pass  them  over  with  this  bare  record  that 
such  horses  existed. 

SARATOGA. — This  son  of  Messenger  was  a  flea-bitten  grey  and 
was  foaled  about  1805.  It  is  believed  he  was  bred  on  Long 
Island,  but  nothing  is  known  of  the  blood  of  his  dam.  He  was 
driven  in  harness  and  did  service  in  several  counties  in  Penn- 
sylvania, and  was  sold  at  auction  in  Philadelphia  to  James  Du- 
bois  of  Salem,  New  Jersey.  He  was  a  great,  strong  horse,  and  was 
kept  at  work  on  the  farm  of  his  owner,  covering  mares  only  a& 
opportunity  offered.  He  was  a  slashing  trotter,  but  it  was  only 
when  his  owner  was  away  from  home  and  got  an  extra  drink  or 
two  that  anybody  ever  had  an  opportunity  to  see  how  fast  he 
could  go.  A  number  of  his  progeny  were  fast  trotters;  among 
them  a  mare  called  Charlotte  Gray  that  was  the  fastest  of  her 
day  in  all  that  region.  Among  his  sons,  one  called  Dove  was- 
greatly  distinguished  in  the  stud. 

NESTOR  AKD  DELIGHT. — These  were  sons  of  Messenger,  the 
former  bred  in  Orange  County,  New  York,  in  1802,  and  was  at 
"Warwick  in  that  county^  1807  in  charge  of  Nehemiah  Finn.  The 
latter  was  bred  in  Westchester  County  in  1806,  and  made  the 
season  of  1827  at  Warwick,  New  York,  in  charge  of  John  G-. 
Blauvelt,  and  is  probably  the  horse  that  was  more  widely  known 
as  Blauvelt's  Messenger.  The  breeding  of  the  dams  of  both 
these  horses  is  very  uncertain. 

MOUNT  HOLLY  was  a  grey  horse,  fifteen  and  a  half  hands  high. 
He  was  foaled  about  1807  and  was  bred  by  Colonel  Udell,  of  Long 
Island.  His  dam  was  by  Bajazet,  and  his  grandam  was  by  Ba- 
shaw. Not  much  is  known  of  him  till  he  was  well  advanced  in 
years  and  was  taken  to  Dutchess  County.  Daniel  T.  Cock  knew 
him  well  on  the  island,  and  he  assured  rne  he  was  a  trotter  in  the 
true  sense  of  the  word.  The  late  Mr.  Daniel  B.  Haight,  a  horse- 
man of  excellent  judgment  and  knowledge,  knew  him  very  well,, 
and  he  describes  him  as  of  the  true  Messenger  grey,  and  a  smooth, 
well-finished  horse  all  over.  His  offspring  were  smooth,  hand- 
some, and  remarkably  tough,  and  from  their  kindly  tempers  they 
were  easily  managed  and  made  horses  fit  for  any  service.  The 
most  noted  of  his  get  were  the  famous  trotters  Paul  Pry  and  Mr. 
Tredwell's  grey  mare  that  went  to  England.  His  cross  appears 


MESSENGER'S  SONS.  251 

in  the  pedigrees  of  many  trotters  and  is  very  highly  prized  to- 
this  day.  In  the  latter  part  of  his  life  he  was  owned  by  Jacob 
Husted,  of  Washington  Hollow,  New  York,  and  made  several 
seasons  there.  His  sight  failed  entirely  as  he  grew  old,  and  he 
died  about  1835.  With  two  such  performers  from  his  own  loins 
as  Paul  Pry  and  the  Tredwell  mare,  it  cannot  be  doubted  that 
he  inherited  and  transmitted  the  true  Messenger  "trotting  in- 
stinct/' and  that  without  any  assistance  from  the  blood  of  hia 
ojam. 

PLATO  was  a  large  brown  horse,  fully  sixteen  hands  high,  and 
was  a  full  brother  to  Bishop's  Hambletouian,  being  by  Messen- 
ger, out  of  Pheasant.  He  was  bred  by  General  Coles,  of  Long 
Island,  and  was  foaled  1802.  As  he  matured  the  general  judg- 
ment was  that  bis  limbs  were  too  light  for  his  body,  and  this  is 
the  only  instance  that  I  can  recall  where  the  get  of  Messenger 
failed  at  this  vital  point.  He  was  trained  and  ran  a  few  races, 
and  from  a  trial  with  Miller's  Damsel  General  Coles  said  he  was  the 
best  horse  that  ever  ran  against  that  famous  mare.  In  a  race 
against  his  half-brother,  Sir  Solomon,  he  won  the  first  heat  of 
four  miles  and  broke  down  in  the  second,  which  finished  him  as 
a  race  horse.  He  was  a  larger  and  a  handsomer  horse  than  his 
full  brother  Hambletonian,  but  at  no  other  point  was  he  so  good. 
When  they  stood  in  the  same  stable  he  was  advertised  at  a  lower 
price.  He  was  a  number  of  years  in  the  stud  on  Long  Island, 
New  Jersey,  and  the  river  counties  of  New  York,  and  after  181& 
at  Pine  Plains  there  is  no  further  trace  of  him.  In  his  physical 
structure  and  doubtless,  in  his  mental  structure  also,  he  took  after 
his  dam,  and  the  only  link  now  recalled  coupling  him  with  the 
trotter  is  the  fact  that  he  was  the  sire  of  the  dam  of  Lewis'  Engi- 
neer, that  was  the  sire  of  the  great  Lady  Suffolk. 

DOVER  MESSENGER  was  a  grey  horse,  and  was  got  by  imported 
Messenger,  but  the  blood  of  his  dam  and  the  year  he  was  foaled 
are  unknown.  He  was  kept  several  seasons  at  South  Dover, 
Dutchess  County,  New  York,  and  left  a  very  valuable  progeny 
strongly  endowed  with  the  instinct  to  trot.  He  was  taken  to- 
the  town  of  Russia,  in  Herkimer  County,  where  he  died.  There 
was  a  younger  horse  bearing  practically  the  same  name,  a  son  of 
Mambrino  Paymaster,  with  which  this  horse  has  often  been  con- 
founded. 

CORIANDER. — This  son  of  Messenger  was  a  bay  horse,  about 
fifteen  and  a  half  hands  high;  was  foaled  in  Queens  County,  New 


252  THE   HOUSE    OF   AMEKICA. 

York,  about  1796,  and  his  dam  was  by  Allen's  Brown  Figure; 
graiidam  by  Rainbow;  great-grandam  by  Dauphin.  He  seems  to 
have  been  kept  on  Long  Island  as  long  as  he  lived.  His  progeny 
was  much  like  their  sire,  and  Mr.  D.  W.  Jones  describes  them  as 
"clean,  wiry,  and  brilliant.  In  their  make-up  there  seemed 
nothing  wasted  and  nothing  wanted."  He  ran  some  races,  as  did 
many  of  his  get.  He  was  bred  upon  one  of  the  early  daughters 
of  Hambletonian,  and  she  produced  the  great  trotter  "Old  Top- 
gallant/' the  sensation  of  his  period  and  one  of  the  most  famous 
of  the  very  early  trotters.  One  of  the  most  remarkable  facts  in 
the  history  of  this  remarkable  old  gelding  is  that  he  ran  some 
races  before  he  was  trained  to  trot. 

FAGDOVVN. — This  son  of  Messenger  was  bred  on  the  Jersey 
side  of  the  Delaware,  not  far  from  Philadelphia,  and  was  foaled, 
I  think,  in  1803.  His  dam  was  represented  to  be  by  Diomed,  and 
if  this  be  correct  it  must  have  been  Tate's  imported  Diomed  that 
was  imported  into  New  Jersey  and  kept  there  a  number  of  years. 
This  was  a  bay  horse  and  must  not  be  confounded  with  the 
-chestnut  horse  of  the  same  name  imported  into  Virginia.  Fag- 
down  became  vicious  and  dangerous,  and  from  this  trait  in  his 
character  he  was  generally  called  the  "Man  Eater."  He  was 
kept  in  the  region  of  Philadelphia  and  south  of  there  for  many 
years,  and  left  a  very  numerous  and  very  valuable  progeny.  They 
were  noted  for  their  superior  qualities  as  road  horses,  and  some 
of  them  were  very  fast,  for  their  day.  For  a  number  of  years  no 
family  of  horses  were  so  popular  about  Philadelphia  as  the  Fag- 
downs.  He  had  a  son  called  Cropped  Fagdown  that  was  fast,  and 
another  son  called  Jersey  Fagdown  that  trotted  some  races 
against  the  great  Andrew  Jackson.  Another  son,  named  after 
his  sire,  was  bred  in  Northeastern  Maryland,  and  was  taken  to 
Eastern  Ohio  in  1829,  and  he  was  kept  in  Oolumbiana,  Mahoning, 
and  Jefferson  counties  for  at  least  ten  years.  He  was  never  in 
a  race  nor  never  trained,  but  his  Quaker  patrons  all  insisted  that 
when  led  by  the  side  of  another  horse  he  could  trot  as  fast  as  a 
pretty  good  horse  could  run.  This  grandson  of  Messenger  was 
the  sire  of  the  grandam  of  Wapsie,  the  well-known  trotter  and 
sire  of  Iowa. 

BRIGHT  PHOEBUS  was  foaled  1804,  the  same  year  as  Hamble- 
tonian. He  was  out  of  the  imported  Pot-8-os  mare,  and  his 
breeeder,  General  Coles,  of  Long  Island,  sold  him  to  Bond  and 
Hughes,  of  Philadelphia.  His  most  noted  achievement  was  at 


MESSENGER'S  SONS.  253 

Washington,  D.  C.,  in  180.8,  when  in  a  sweepstakes  he  more  than 
distanced  the  great  Sir  Archy,  by  catching  him  when  he  had  the 
distemper.  His  racing  career  was  respectable,  but  not  brilliant, 
and  when  that  ended  it  is  not  known  what  became  of  him. 

SLASHER,  SHAFTSBURY,  HOTSPUR. — There  was  quite  a  famous 
brood  mare  owned  somewhere  in  Jersey  called  Jenny  Duter,  or 
Jenny  Oiter,  as  some  authorities  have  it.  She  was  got  by  True 
Briton;  dam  Quaker  Lass  by  imported  Juniper;  grandam  Molly 
Pacolet,  by  imported  Pacolet,  etc.,  tracing  on  six  or  eight  more 
crosses  that  are  all  fudge.  This  mare  was  bred  to  Messenger  about 
1801,  and  produced  Shaftsbury;  her  daughter  by  Liberty  was  bred 
to  him  about  the  same  time  and  produced  Slasher,  and  about  the 
same  time  her  granddaughter  by  Slender  was  also  bred  to  him  and 
produced  Hotspur.  These  three  sons  of  Messenger  do  not  seem 
to  have  ever  been  trained,  and  very  little  ©f  their  history  can  be 
traced,  except  that  they  were  kept  as  stallions  in  different  parts 
of  New  Jersey.  It  is  not  known  that  their  blood  has  had  any  in- 
fluence upon  the  American  trotting  horse. 

MESSENGER  (HCTCHINSON'S). — This  was  a  large  grey  horse, 
foaled  in  1792,  and  bred  by  Mathias  Hutchinson,  of  Pennsylvania, 
near  Philadelphia.  His  dam  was  by  Hunt's  Grey  Figure,  son  of 
imported  Figure.  He  was  kept  in  Monmouth  County,  New 
Jersey,  1797,  and  it  is  probable  that  he  was  often  represented  as 
imported  Messenger  himself.  I  have  no  knowledge  of  this  horse 
or  his  progeny  beyond  the  mere  facts  here  given. 

MESSENGER  (COOPER'S). — This  son  of  imported  Messenger  was 
generally  known  as  "Cooper's  Grey"  and  sometimes  as  Ringgold. 
He  was  sixteen  hands  high  and  was  foaled  about  1803.  He  was 
bred  in  Montgomery  County,  Pennsylvania,  and  was  kept  about 
Philadelphia,  on  both  sides  of  the  Delaware,  till  1821,  when  he 
was  sold  by  the  administrators  of  Jacob  Kirk,  and  it  has  been 
said  he  was  taken  to  the  Wabash  by  Amos  Cooper.  He  ran  some 
races  when  he  was  young,  and  was  a  horse  of  a  good  deal  of  local 
fame.  He  was  liberally  patronized  in  the  stud  and  left  valuable 
progeny.  It  has  been  suggested  that  probably  he  was  the  sire  of 
Amazonia,  the  dam  of  Abdallah;  but  as  there  is  nothing  to  sup- 
port this  suggestion  except  the  mere  matter  of  location,  and  as 
all  that  has  ever  been  claimed  for  her  paternity  is  that  she  was 
by  "a  son  of  Messenger,"  we  must  not  forget  that  there  were 
plenty  of  other  sons  of  Messenger  in  the  same  locality  that  might 
have  been  her  sire. 


:254  THE    HOUSE    OF    AMERICA. 

The  name  "Messenger"  was  more  sadly  abused  in  its 
•duplication  in  the  closing  of  the  last  and  the  early  decades  of 
the  present  century  than  that  of  any  other  horse,  or  perhaps  of 
all  other  horses  of  that  period  put  together.  Multitudes  of  his 
.sons  were  called  "Messenger,"  and,  in  the  next  generation,  mul- 
titudes of  his  grandsons  gloried  in  the  same  cognomen,  and  thus 
generation  after  generation  perpetuated  it,  in  widening  circles, 
till  "confusion  became  worse  confounded,"  leaving  the  historian 
in  helpless  and  hopeless  ignorance  as  to  what  was  true  and  what 
was  false.  When  grey  horses  in  the  second,  third,  or  fourth  re- 
move from  the  imported  horse  became  old,  it  required  but  little 
"diplomacy"  to  satisfy  the  public  that  they  were  true  sons  of 
the  original,  and  this  became  the  custom. 


'- 


CHAPTER  XX. 
MESSENGER'S  DESCENDANTS. 

History  of  Abdallah — Characteristics  of  his  dam,  Amazonia — Speculations  as  to 
her  blood — Description  of  Abdallah — Alraack,  prggenitor  of  the  Champion 
line — Mambrino  Paymaster,  sire  of  Mambrino  Chief — History  and  pedigree 
— Mambrino  Messenger — Harris'  Hambletonian — Judson's  Hambletonian — 
Andrus'  Hambletonian,  sire  of  the  famous  Princess,  Happy  Medium's  dam. 

ABDALLAH. — This  grandson  of  Messenger  has  been  popularly 
and  justly  designated  as  the  "king  of  trotting  sires  of  his  genera- 
tion." He  was  bred  by  John  Tredwell,  of  Queens  County,  Long 
Island,  and  was  foaled  1823.  His  sire  was  Mambrino,  son  of 
Messenger,  and  his  dam  was  Amazonia,  one  of  the  most  distin- 
guished trotters  of  her  day.  Concerning  the  breeding  and  origin 
•of  Amazonia  there  has  been  great  diversity  of  opinion  among 
horsemen  and  a  great  amount  of  controversy  among  writers. 
It  is  not  my  purpose  to  enter  into  a  discussion  of  the  questions 
raised  on  this  point,  but  I  would  hardly  be  doing  justice  to  his- 
iory  to  pass  it  over  unnoticed.  I  will,  therefore,  try  to  give  a 
brief  synopsis  of  the  history  and  the  arguments  urged,  and  refer 
the  reader  to  the  first  and  second  volumes  of  Wallace's  Monthly 
for  a  more  extended  consideration  of  the  questions  raised. 

The  first  representation  of  her  pedigree  was  that  she  was  a 
daughter  of  imported  Messenger,  and  the  next  was  that  she  was 
by  a  son  of  Messenger.  On  the  first  claim,  that  she  was  by  Mes- 
senger, no  argument  was  possible,  one  way  or  the  other,  on 
account  of  dates;  but  against  the  second  claim,  that  she  was  by 
.a  son  of  Messenger,  the  arguments  were  numerous  and  vehement. 
All  these  arguments  were  based  wholly  upon  her  coarse  external 
conformation  and  the  absence  of  all  resemblance  to  the  Messen- 
ger family.  Among  the  supporters  of  this  view  were  many  of 
the  most  intelligent  and  trustworthy  horsemen  of  the  whole 
country.  Indeed,  the  preponderance  of  intelligence  as  well  as 
numbers  seemed  to  be  on  that  side.  That  she  had  "coarse, 
ragged  hips,"  that  she  had  a  "rat  tail,"  that  she  "had  hair 


256  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

enough  on  her  legs  to  stuff  a  mattress/'  that  she  was  "a  muddy 
sorrel,"  etc.,  were  all  urged  to  prove  that  she  was  not  by  a  son  of 
Messenger.  It  is  true  that  many  entered  into  this  controversy 
who  never  saw  the  mare  and  who  knew  nothing  about  her  appear- 
ance, but  there  were  others  who  knew  her  perfectly,  among  them 
my  venerable  friend  David  W.  Jones,  to  whom  we  are  all  indebted 
for  so  many  treasures  from  his  storehouse  of  very  valuable 
memories. 

On  the  other  side  there  were  some  little  scraps  of  history,  that 
at  the  vital  point  may  have  been  history  or  may  have  been  fiction. 
In  the  certificate  of  Sale  of  Abdallah,  April  27,  1830,  to  Mr.  Isaac 
Snediker,  his  breeder,  Mr.  John  Tredwell,  says:  "And  believe  him 
to  be  the  very  best,  bred  trotting  stallion  in  this  country,  and  be 
it  enough  to  know  that  his  sire  was  Mambrino  and  his  dam  Ama- 
zonia." It  has  been  argued  that  it  would  be  very  inconsistent  for 
a  man  of  Mr.  Tredwell's  standing  to  certify  that  Abdallah  "was  the 
very  best  bred  trotting  stallion  in  this  country,"  if  he  knew  nothing 
of  the  blood  of  his  dam,  drawing  the  inference  that  he  must 
have  known  and  believed  the  representations  of  his  nephew,  B. 
T.  Kissam,  from  whom  he  got  Amazonia.  The  story  of  the 
original  purchase  of  Amazonia  by  B.  T.  Kissam  and  given  to  me 
by  his  brother,  Timothy  T.  Kissam,  in  1870,  is  as  follows:  Ama- 
zonia was  purchased  by  B.  T.  Kissam,  a  dry  goods  merchant  of 
New  York,  when  on  an  excursion  of  pleasure  in  the  vicinity  of 
Philadelphia  about  1814.  She  was  brought  out  of  a  team  and 
was  then  four  years  old  past,  his  attention  having  been  called  to 
her  as  an  animal  of  much  promise.  He  used  her  for  his  own 
driving  a  short  time  and  sold  her  to  his  uncle,  John  Tredwell. 
"Amazonia  was  represented  to  my  brother  to  have  been  a  get  of 
imported  Messenger." 

Now,  in  considering  whether  this  scrap  of  history  is  probably 
true,  the  geographical  question  has  been  urged  with  telling  effect. 
Messenger  had  been  kept  a  number  of  years  on  both  sides  of  the 
Delaware,  right  on  the  way  to  Philadelphia,  his  fee  had  been 
above  that  of  any  other  stallion,  and  a  large  percentage  of  his 
colts  had  been  kept  entire.  In  no  part  of  the  country,  perhaps, 
were  there  so  many  sons  of  Messenger  seeking  public  patronage. 
The  geography  and  the  chronology  of  the  question,  therefore, 
both  sustain  the  probability  of  its  truthfulness.  Whether  Mr. 
Kissam  crossed  the  river  at  Trenton,  or  Burlington,  or  Camden 
he  was  right  in  the  hotbed  of  the  sons  of  Messenger.  "If 


267 

Amazonia"  it  has  been  asked,  "was  as  coarse  and  forbidding  as 
represented  in  her  appearance,  what  induced  Mr.  Kissam  to  buy 
her?"  He  wanted  a  carriage  horse  and  he  wanted  one  that  could 
not  only  show  good  action,  but  one  that  had  a  right  of  inherit- 
ance to  good  action.  He  knew  the  Messengers  and  knew  that 
beauty  and  style  were  not  family  traits  in  that  tribe.  Many  of 
them  were  coarse,  and  possibly  as  coarse  as  Amazonia.  Her  very 
coarseness  and  lack  of  style  is,  under  the  circumstances,  a  strong 
argument  that  in  choosing  her  Mr.  Kissam  had  regard  for  her 
Messenger  blood. 

Another  argument,  resting  on  "the  internal  evidences,"  has 
been  urged  with  considerable  force  and  it  is  very  hard  to  answer 
it.  Amazonia  was  a  mare  of  tested  and  known  speed.  She  was 
in  a  number  of  races  to  saddle  and  had  won  several  of  them  in 
less  than  three  minutes  along  about  1816-18,  and  when  Major 
William  Jones,  in  1820,  accepted  the  challenge  to  produce  a  horse 
that  could  trot  a  mile  in  three  minutes  for  one  thousand  dollars, 
he  knew  very  well  what  he  was  doing,  for  he  had  seen  Amazonia 
do  it  a  number  of  times.  Her  best  time  was  about  2:54,  which 
in  that  day  was  considered  phenomenally  fast.  If  we  were  to 
meet  a  running  horse  out  on  the  plains  that  could  run  away  from 
all  others,  we  would  naturally  and  justly  conclude  that  he  had 
some  of  the  blood  of  the  race  horse  in  his  veins.  If  we  have  a 
pacer  and  we  learn  he  came  from  a  section  of  the  country  where 
a  certain  tribe  of  pacers  abounded,  we  would  naturally  conclude 
that  he  belonged  to  that  tribe,  especially  if  we  knew  there  were 
no  other  pacers  in  that  section.  If  we  have  a  trotter  that  can 
go  away  from  all  other  trotters,  and  we  know  that  this  trotter 
came  from  a  section  abounding  in  a  family  of  trotters,  and  in  noth- 
ing else  that  can  trot,  we  naturally  and  justly  conclude  that  this 
trotter  came  from  some  member  of  that  family  of  trotters.  This 
argument  from  the  "internal  evidences"  seems  almost  axiomatic, 
and  when  taken  in  connection  with  the  historical  argument, 
unsatisfactory  though  it  be,  they  together  lay  the  foundation 
for  a  very  strong  probability  that  Amazonia  was  by  a  son  of 
Messenger. 

Abdallah  was  in  color  a  beautiful  bay,  about  fifteen  and  a  half 
hands  high,  and  there  was  a  measure  of  coarseness  about  him  that 
he  could  not  well  escape,  as  both  his  sire  and  dam  were  endowed 
with  that  undesirable  quality.  The  one  exception  to  this  was  in 
the  character  of  his  coat,  which  was  very  fine  and  glossy  when  in 


258  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

healthy  condition.  His  reputation  as  a  great  trotting  sire  was 
very  widely  extended  during  his  lifetime,  but  his  lack  of  sym- 
metry and  his  "rat  tail/'  which  he  inherited  from  his  dam,  so 
impaired  his  acceptability  with  the  public  that  he  never  was 
very  largely  patronized.  Besides  this  he  had  an  unconquerable 
will  of  his  own,  which  he  transmitted  to  his  offspring  very  gener- 
ally. This  willfulness  was  not  a  desirable  quality  in  a  horse  for 
drudgery,  and  hence  most  of  his  patrons  were  such  as  were 
seeking  for  gameness  and  speed.  When  he  was  four  years  old  he 
was  not  in  the  stud,  and  it  is  understood  that  Mr.  Tredwell  un- 
dertook to  break  him  thoroughly  and  train  him  that  year.  It  is 
also  understood  that  when  put  in  harness  he  kicked  everything 
to  pieces  within  his  reach  and  that  all  thoughts  of  training  were 
soon  abandoned.  He  never  was  in  harness  again  until,  in  ex- 
treme old  age,  he  was  sold  for  five  dollars  to  a  fish  peddler,  and 
the  peddler's  wagon  was  soon  reduced  to  kindling  wood. 

He  was  kept  at  different  points  on  Long  Island,  and  one  season 
in  New  Jersey,  till  the  fall  of  1839,  when  he,  with  Commodore, 
another  son  of  Mambrino,  was  sold  to  Mr.  John  W.  Hunt,  of  Lex- 
ington, Kentucky,  where  they  made  the  season  of  1840.  Com- 
modore was  much  the  more  attractive  horse  of  the  two,  and  did 
a  large  business,  while  Abdallah  was  almost  wholly  neglected, 
leaving  only  about  half  a  dozen  colts.  Meantime  his  progeny  on 
the  island  began  to  show  their  speed  and  their  racing  qualities;  a 
company  was  formed  and  he  was  brought  back  from  Kentucky 
and  made  the  seasons  of  1841  and  1842  at  the  Union  Course, 
Long  Island.  He  was  at  Goshen,  New  York,  1843,  at  Freehold, 
New  Jersey,  1844  and  1845,  at  Chester,  New  York,  1846-47-48,  at 
Bull's  Head,  New  York,  1849,  and  did  nothing,  then  at  the 
Union  Course  and  Patchogue,  Long  Island,  and  was  not  off  the 
island  again.  After  the  period  of  his  usefulness  was  past  his  in- 
human owners  turned  him  out  on  a  bleak,  sandy  beach  on  the 
Long  Island  shore,  and  there  he  starved  to  death  in  the  piercing 
November  winds,  without  a  shelter  or  a  friend. 

Abdallah  was  the  sire  of  Hambletonian,  1.0,  the  greatest  of  all 
trotting  progenitors  and  greater  than  all  others  combined.  This 
fact  alone  has  made  his  name  imperishable  in  the  annals  of  the 
trotting  horse.  A  number  of  his  other  sons  were  kept  for  stal - 
lions  and  some  of  them  lived  to  old  age,  but  they  were  all  failures 
in  the  stud.  His  daughters,  generally,  proved  to  be  most  valua- 
ble brood  mares,  producing  speed  to  almost  any  and  every  cross. 


MESSENGER'S  DESCENDANTS.  259 

A  pedigree  tracing  to  an  "Abdallah  mare"  has  always  enhanced 
the  value  of  a  family. 

ALMACK. — Mr.  John  Tredwell  bred  his  famous  team  of  driving 
mares,  Amazonia  and  Sophonisba,  to  Mambrino  in  the  spring  of 
1822,  and  the  next  year  they  each  produced  a  bay  horse  colt  that 
he  named  Abdallah  and  Almack.  Sophonisba,  the  dam  of 
Almack,  was  a  superior  mare,  but  she  was  not  fast  enough  for  her 
mate.  Almack,  however,  was  a  good  horse  and  left  some  trot- 
ters. I  have  no  particular  description  of  him  at  hand  and  noth- 
ing can  now  be  given  of  his  history  further  than  that  some  of  his 
daughters  produced  well  and  that  he  seems  to  have  been  kept  all 
his  life  on  Long  Island.  His  dam  Sophonisba  was  got  by  a  grand- 
son of  imported  Baronet,  as  represented,  but  this  is  so  indefinite 
as  to  be  unsatisfactory  and  suspicious.  As  none  of  the  Baronets 
could  ever  trot,  even  "a  little  bit/'  it  is  evident  that  whatever 
trotting  inheritance  Almaek  possessed  came  to  him  from  his 
sire.  Aside  from  a  number  of  his  descendants  that  were  recog- 
nized trotters  of  merit  there  was  one  in  particular  that  established 
Almack  as  a  progenitor  of  a  great  family  of  trotters.  A  son  of 
his  bred  by  George  Raynor,  of  Huntington,  Long  Island,  in  1842, 
and  known  as  the  "Ray nor  Colt,"  out  of  Spirit  by  Engineer  II., 
sire  of  Lady  Suffolk,  was  led  behind  a  sulky  at  a  fair  at  Hunting- 
ton,  when  he  was  eighteen  months  old,  and  he  went  so  fast  and 
showed  such  a  magnificent  way  of  doing  it,  that  he  was  named 
*' Champion"  by  William  T.  Porter,  editor  of  the  Spirit  of  the 
Times.  At  three  years  old  he  was  driven  a  full  mile  in  3:05  and 
this  was  a  "world's  record"  for  colts  of  that  age  at  that  time.  In 
1846  he  was  purchased  by  William  R.  Grinnell  for  two  thousand 
six  hundred  dollars  and  taken  to  Cayuga  County,  where  he 
founded  a  great  tribe  of  trotters  that  is  now  known  everywhere 
as  the  "Champion  Family."  A  fuller  account  of  this  horse  will 
i)e  found  at  another  place  in  this  volume. 

MAMBRIXO  PAYMASTER  (widely  known  in  later  years  as  Blind 
Paymaster). — This  was  a  large,  strong-boned,  dark-bay  horse, 
sixteen  hands  and  an  inch  high.  When  young  he  was  somewhat 
light  and  leggy,  but  with  age  he  spread  out  and  became  a  horse 
of  substance.  He  was  bred  by  Azariah  Arnold,  of  the  town  of 
Washington,  in  Dutch  ess  County,  New  York.  There  is  some 
uncertainty  about  the  year  this  horse  was  foaled,  but  it  was  some- 
where between  1822  and  1826.  He  was  got  by  Mambrino,  son  of 
Messenger,  and  his  dam  was  represented  to  be  by  imported  Pay- 


260  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

master.  The  late  Mr.  Edwin  Thorne  made  a  statement  a  few 
years  ago  that  in  an  interview  with  Azariah  Arnold  he  said  that 
he  did  not  know  or  remember  the  horse  that  was  the  sire  of  the 
dam.  At  that  time  Mr.  Arnold  was  very  old,  and  doubtless  his 
mental  faculties  very  much  impaired,  so  it  would  not  be  remark- 
able that  he  should  have  forgotten  all  about  it.  On  the  other 
hand,  Nelson  Haight,  Daniel  B.  Haight,  Seth  P.  Hopson,  and 
others  of  like  high  character,  maintain  that  Mr.  Arnold,  in  his 
younger  days,  always  represented  the  mare  to  be  by  Paymaster, 
and  the  name  of  the  horse  itself  is  very  strong  evidence  that  he 
did  so  represent  it,  and  is  a  standing  proclamation  to  that  effect. 
There  can  be  no  possible  doubt  that  in  earlier  life  Mr.  Arnold 
constantly  represented  this  mare  to  be  by  Paymaster;  neither  can 
there  be  any  reasonable  doubt  that  when  his  faculties  were  im- 
paired with  age  he  told  Mr.  Thorne  that  he  did  not  remember 
her  pedigree.  Mr.  Arnold's  neighbors  all  agree  that  he  was  a 
man  of  unblemished  character  and  incapable  of  a  willful  misrepre- 
sentation, when  in  possession  of  his  faculties.  Again,  that  this 
Paymaster  cross  was  not  only  possible,  but  probable,  is  shown  by 
the  fact  that  imported  Paymaster  was  kept  by  Ebenezer  Haight, 
in  the  year  1807,  in  the  same  township  with  Azariah  Arnold,  and 
the  years  1808  and  1809  in  the  same  part  of  the  county.  There- 
fore, Mr.  Thorne  to  the  contrary  notwithstanding,  I  have  but 
little  doubt  that  the  Paymaster  cross  is  correct. 

He  had  a  small  star  in  his  forehead  and  a  little  white  on  one 
hind  foot,  His  back,  loin  and  hips  were  altogether  superior,  and 
those  who  knew  him  best  say  they  never  saw  his  equal  at  these 
points.  His  head  was  large  and  bony,  with  an  ear  after  the 
Mambrino  model.  His  neck  was  of  medium  length  and  his- 
shoulder  good.  His  hind  legs  were  quite  crooked  and  too  much 
cut  in  below  the  hock  in  front,  giving  the  legs  at  that  point  3r 
narrow  and  weak  appearance;  his  hocks  were  large  and  at  the 
curb  place  showed  a  fullness.  His  cannon  bones,  all  round,  were 
short  for  a  horse  of  his  size,  and  his  feet  were  excellent.  He  was 
slow  in  maturing,  but  when  he  filled  out  he  lost  all  that  narrow, 
weedy  appearance  which  characterized  his  colthood.  He  was  not 
beautiful,  but  powerful. 

About  1828  he  was  sold  and  taken  to  Binghamton,  New  York. 
Meantime  his  colts  came  forward  and  proved  to  be  so  valuable 
that  Nelson  and  Daniel  B.  Haight  and  Gilbert  Jones  purchased 
and  brought  him  back  to  Dutchess  County  about  the  year  1840. 


MESSENGER'S  DESCENDANTS.  261 

He  was  not  a  sure  foal-getter,  but  his  stock  proved  to  be  of  great 
value.  When  brought  back  from  Broome  County  he  was  blind. 
He  made  one  season  on  Long  Island  in  charge  of  George  Tappan; 
the  other  seasons  till  1847  he  was  kept  in  Dutchess  County  in  the 
neighborhood  of  his  owners.  In  1847  he  was  sold  to  Mr.  Gilbert 
Holmes  and  taken  to  Vermont,  where  he  died  after  getting  one 
tfolt.  Many  of  his  sons  were  kept  as  stallions,  but  the  most 
famous  of  his  get  were  the  mares  lola  and  Lady  Moore,  and  last 
but  not  least,  his  famous  son  Mambrino  Chief,  the  founder  of  a 
great  family  of  trotters  in  Kentucky.  His  stock  were  probably 
more  noted  and  more  highly  prized  than  that  of  any  of  the  sons 
of  Mambrino  that  stood  in  Dutchess  County.  As  Abdallah  was 
the  link  by  which  the  greatest  of  all  trotting  families  are  con- 
nected with  Messenger,  so  Mambrino  Paymaster  is  the  link 
through  which  the  family  easily  entitled  to  second  place  reaches 
the  same  illustrious  original. 

MAMBRIXO  JR.  (BoxE  SWINGER)  was  a  beautiful  bay  horse, 
foaled  18*2-,  got  by  Mambrino,  son  of  Messenger;  dam  not 
traced.  He  was  bred  on  Long  Island  and  was  owned  by  George 
Tappan,  near  Jericho,  Long  Island.  About  1833-4  he  made 
some  seasons  at  Washington  Hollow,  Dutchess  County.  He  was 
.about  fifteen  hands  three  inches  high  arid  was  considered  more 
blood-like  and  handsome  than  most  of  bis  family.  He  was  a 
strong  breeder,  giving  most  of  his  colts  his  own  elegant  color. 

MAMBRINO  MESSENGER  (commonly  known  as  the  Burton 
Horse)  was  foaled  about  1821.  He  was  got  by  Mambrino,  son  of 
Messenger;  dam  by  Coffin's  Messenger,  son  of  Messenger;  grandam 
by  Black  and  All  Black;  great-grandam  by  Feather.  He  was  bred 
by  Abram  Burton,  of  Washington  Hollow,  New  York.  He  was  a 
beautiful  bay,  about  fifteen  hands  three  inches  high,  and  was  the 
.same  age  as  Mambrino  Paymaster,  and  they  were  rivals  for  a 
number  of  years,  each  having  his  friends  and  adherents.  He  was 
finer  in  the  bone,  having  more  finish  and  beauty  than  his  rival, 
and  what  was  still  more  effective  with  the  public,  he  could  out- 
trot  him.  Many  of  his  offspring  proved  to  be  most  excellent 
roadsters  and  some  of  them  were  fast.  He  was  probably  taken  to 
Western  New  York,  but  I  have  not  found  any  trace  of  his  loca- 
tion or  history.  This  name,  Mambrino  Messenger,  was  borne  by 
several  other  horses  of  different  degrees  of  affinity  to  the  orig- 
inals. 

HAMBLETONIAN  (HARRIS')  (also  known  as   Bristol   Grey  and 


262  THE    HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

Kemington  Horse). — This  was  a  grey  horse,  about  sixteen  hands 
high,  and  possessed  great  strength  and  substance.  When  young 
he  was  an  iron  grey  and  probably  pretty  dark,  but  as  he  advanced 
in  age  he  became  lighter  in  color.  His  head  was  large  and  bony, 
with  great  width  between  the  eyes.  He  was  short  in  the  back, 
with  long  hips,  and  the  rise  of  the  withers  commenced  far  back, 
showing  a  fine,  oblique  shoulder.  He  was  a  horse  of  unusually 
large  bone  formation;  his  limbs  were  large,  but  flat  and  clean, 
with  a  heavy  growth  of  hair  at  the  fetlocks.  He  was  of  docile  and 
kindly  disposition  and  worked  well  either  alone  or  with  another. 
His  gait  was  open  and  decided  and  at  a  walk  his  long  slinging 
steps  carried  him  over  the  ground  unusually  fast.  His  speed  as 
a  trotter  was  never  developed,  but  his  action  at  that  gait  was  so 
free,  open  and  square  that  those  who  knew  him  well  have  in- 
sisted that  his  manner  of  going  indicated  the  possibility  of  great 
improvement,  if  he  had  been  handled  with  that  view.  His  oil- 
spring  were  slow  in  maturing,  and  for  many  years,  indeed  till 
toward  the  end  of  his  life,  he  was  not  appreciated  as  a  stallion. 
He  was  in  constant  competition  with  the  little,  plump,  trim  and 
trappy  Morgans,  and  at  three  and  four  years  old  his  long,  lathy, 
plain  colts  cut  but  a  sorry  figure  against  the  well  formed  and 
fully  developed  Morgans  of  their  own  age.  With  such  a  rivalry, 
sustained  by  the  question  of  profit  to  the  breeder  by  early  sales, 
it  is  not  remarkable  that  he  should  have  been  neglected,  till  it 
was  clearly  demonstrated  that  he  transmitted  the  true  Messenger 
trotting  instinct  in  greater  strength  than  any  of  his  competitors. 
He  was  bred  by  Isaac  Munson,  of  Wallingford,  Vermont;  foaled 
1823,  got  by  Bishop's  Hambletonian,  son  of  Messenger;  dam  the 
Munson  mare  that  was  brought  from  Boston,  1813.  There  never 
has  been  any  question  about  the  sire  of  this  horse,  but  up  to 
1869  the  representation  made  by  Mr.  Harris  that  his  dam  was 
an  imported  English  mare  was  generally  accepted  as  the  truth. 
I  was  led  to  doubt  this,  and  in  December  of  that  year  I  made  a 
thorough  search  of  the  records  of  the  custom-house  in  Boston, 
and  found  the  claim  was  without  any  foundation  whatever. 
Through  the  kindness  of  Mr.  Henry  D.  Noble  I  was  enabled  to 
get  beyond  Mr.  Harris,  who  really  knew  nothing  about  the  mare, 
back  to  the  Munson  family,  and  to  Mr.  Joseph  Tucker,  the 
earliest  and  best  authority  living  in  1870.  In  order  that  this  evi- 
dence may  be  preserved  I  will  here  insert  Mr.  Tucker's  letter 
entire. 


MESSENGER'S  DESCENDANTS.  263 

"  MILFORD,  X.  H.,  May  4th,  1870. 
"  MK.  J.  H.  WALLACE,  Muscatine,  Iowa. 

"  DEAR  SIR:  Yours  of  22d  of  April  is  duly  received  and  contents  noted.  I 
was  24  years  old  when  first  acquainted  with  the  dam  of  the  '  Harris  Horse,'  so 
called,  in  the  fall  of  1813.  Was  then  carrying  on  a  farm,  now  owned  by  Win. 
Randall,  Esq.,  in  this  town,  for  Mr.  Israel  Munson,  a  commission  merchant 
then  doing  business  on  India  Street,  and  afterward  on  Central  Wharf,  Boston. 
I  was  in  Boston  in  the  fall  of  1813,  as  above,  and  found  the  dam  (of  Hamble- 
tonian)  and  mate  in  Mr.  Munson's  possession.  He  said  they  had  been  '  leaders ' 
in  a  stage  team,  and  they  acted  as  if  green  about  holding  back,  etc.  He  never 
said  she  was  imported  from  England,  neither  did  I  hear  such  a  story  till  two 
or  three  years  ago.  The  dam  was  called  '  a  Messenger.'  All  the  description  I 
can  give  of  her  is  that  she  was  a  strong,  well-built,  light  dapple  grey,  and  would 
weigh  ten  hundred,  certain.  The  span  was  well  matched.  The  nigh  one  (the 
dam)  was  more  serviceable  than  the  other.  Led  them  all  the  way  from  Boston 
behind  an  ox  team;  kept  them  till  the  middle  of  April  and  then  returned  the 
pair  to  Boston.  Mr.  Munson  drove  them  up,  only  stopping  to  dinner,  when  on 
his  way  to  Vermont  in  August,  1814,  and  I  didn't  see  them  again  until  Decem- 
ber. I  then  drove  them  from  Boston  to  Vermont,  and  used  them  a  year  on  the 
Munson  farm,  on  Otter  Creek,  in  Wallingford.  In  June,  1815,  I  took  them  to 
Phoenix  Horse  (bay,  black  mane  and  tail,  good  looking  and  smart)  in  Clarendon 
Flats.  Both  stood  and  had  foals  the  spring  after  I  left  Mr.  Munson's  employ. 
The  off  mare  was  occasionally  a  little  lame,  I  think  in  the  off  fore  foot,  when 
bard  drove,  but  the  nigh  one  was  perfectly  free  from  lameness  or  limping.  I 
left  Mr.  Munson  in  the  spring  of  1816,  and  know  nothing  of  mares  afterward. 
"Yours  truly,  JOSEPH  TUCKER, 

"(By  Geo.  W.  Fox)." 

1  have  given  this  letter  entire,  with  the  exception  of  a  few 
closing  sentences,  that  the  public  may  be  able  to  judge  of  its 
authenticity.  That  these  mares  were  leaders  in  a  stage  team 
when  Mr.  Munson  bought  them  is  confirmed  by  members  of  the 
Munson  family,  and  that  the  nigh  mare  was  represented  to  be  a 
Messenger  at  the  time  of  the  purchase  I  have  not  the  least 
doubt.  But  whether  she  was  really  a  Messenger  is  quite  another 
question.  All  I  can  say  is,  it  was  possible  in  the  nature  of 
things;  and  the  employment  and  qualities  of  the  mare,  together 
with  the  representations  of  Mr.  Munson,  appear  to  make  it 
probable.  During  the  mare's  lifetime  I  find  she  was  spoken  of 
in  the  Munson  family  and  about  Wallingford  as  "the  imported 
Messenger  mare"  and  in  this  phrase,  no  doubt,  was  the  origin  of 
the  story  that  she  was  herself  imported.  When  this  .phrase, 
through  her  son,  reached  the  next  outer  circle,  "imported  Mes- 
senger mare"  no  longer  meant  a  mare  by  imported  Messenger, 
but  an  imported  mare  by  Messenger. 


264  THE    HOUSE    OF    AMERICA. 

At  the  point  where  Mr.  Tucker's  knowledge  of  this  mare  ceases, 
fortunately  Mr.  Isaac  B.  Munson,  of  Wallingford,  takes  up  the 
history  and  carries  it  forward,  with  great  particularity,  to  the 
time  of  her  death  about  1826.  She  produced  several  foals  by 
different  horses,  and  while  they  were  all  valuable  animals,  the 
only  one  that  is  known  to  history  is  the  subject  of  this  sketch. 
When  Hambletonian  of  Vermont  was  two  years  old  Mr.  Munson 
sold  him  to  Samuel  Edgerton  and  others,  of  AYalliiigford,  and 
they  kept  him  in  the  stud  till  about  1828,  when  they  sold  him  to 
Mr.  Eddy,  of  Bristol,  Vermont,  and  in  the  hands  of  the  Eddy 
family  he  was  kept  at  Bristol,  New  Haven,  and  other  points  in 
and  about  Addison  County  till  about  1835,  when  he  was  kept  one  or 
two  years  again  in  Wallingford  and  adjacent  towns.  About  1837 
he  was  sold  to  Joshua  Remington,  of  Huntington,  Vermont,  and 
was  taken  there.  He  stood  in  various  parts  of  Chittenden 
County,  and  became  well  known  as  the  "Remington  Horse." 
Unfortunately  there  is  no  guide  to  dates  in  these  transfers  and 
it  is  not  known  just  how  long  Mr.  Remington  owned  him.  He 
next  passed  into  the  hands  of  Mr.  Russell  Harris,  New  Haven, 
Connecticut,  and  remained  his  till  he  died  late  in  the  year  1847. 

The  location  of  this  horse  was  unfavorable  either  to  a  large  or 
to  a  numerous  progeny  of  trotters.  He  was  surrounded  with 
Morgan  blood,  trappy  and  stylish  and  fast  growing  in  popularity 
on  the  supposition  that  they  were  trotters — a  most  valuable  tribe 
as  family  horses,  but  none  of  them  were  able  to  trot  fast  without 
the  introduction  of  trotting  blood  from  the  outside.  He  lived  in 
a  period  antedating  the  real  development  of  the  trotter  and  the 
keeping  of  records  of  performances,  and  hence  we  must  not 
judge  of  his  merits  as  a  trotting  sire  by  comparing  the  list  of  his 
performers  with  lists  of  later  generations.  Green  Mountain 
Maid  was  one  of  the  best  of  her  day  and  made  a  record  of  2:28| 
in  1853,  and  the  same  year  the  famous  pacing  gelding  Hero 
made  a  record  of  2:20|.  Probably  the  best  trotter  from  his  loins 
was  Sontag,  with  a  wagon  record  in  1855  of  2:31.  This  mare 
was  originally  a  pacer,  and  whether  his  dam  was  by  imported 
Messenger  or  not  we  must  conclude  that  the  tendency  to  the 
lateral  action  was  strong  in  his  progeny.  Lady  Shannon, 
Trouble,  Vermont,  Modesty,  and  True  John  were  all  famous  per- 
formers in  their  day.  The  last  named  was  kept  in  the  stud  a 
few  years  and  was  known  as  the  Hanchett  Horse.  He  fell  into 
the  hands  of  Sim  D.  Hoagland,  of  this  vicinity,  became  ugly  and 


MESSENGER'S  DESCENDANTS.  265 

was  made  a  gelding.  As  a  weight  puller  he  had  no  equal  in  his 
day.  His  daughters  became  the  dams  of  many  noted  producers 
and  performers,  and  through  the  doubling  of  his  blood  and  its 
predominating  influence  we  have  the  famous  General  Knox  and 
his  tribe.  But  few  of  his  sons  were  kept  as  stallions;  among 
them  the  best  known  is  Hambletonian,  814,  known  as  the  Parris 
Horse  and  the  sire  of  the  stout  campaigner,  Joker,  2:22%.  Ver- 
mont Hambletonian  (known  as  the  Noble  or  Harrington  Horse) 
was  one  of  his  best  and  best-bred  sons.  He  died  in  1865,  leaving 
a  valuable  progeny. 

HAMBLETOXIAN  (JUDSON'S)  was  a  brown  horse  and  resembled 
his  sire  very  much  in  both  size  and  form.  He  was  foaled  1821 ,  got 
by  Bishop's  Hambletonian,  son  of  Messenger;  dam  by  Wells' 
Magnum  Bonum.  This  Magnum  Bonum  family  abounded  in 
that  region,  and  it  was  a  very  good  one,  whatever  the  blood  may 
have  been.  This  horse  was  bred  by  Judge  Underbill,  of  Dorset, 
Vermont,  and  sold,  1529,  to  Dr.  Nathan  Judson,  of  Pawlet,  Ver- 
mont. He  was  kept  in  that  region  till  he  died  about  1841.  His 
progeny  were  very  numerous  and  valuable. 

HAMBLETOXIAN  (ANDRUS')  was  a  brown  horse  nearly  sixteen 
hands  high.  He  was  a  well  formed  and  evenly  balanced  horse, 
all  over,  with  an  objectionable  lack  of  bone  just  below  the  fore- 
knee.  His  head  and  ear  were  strongly  after  the  Messenger 
model.  I  have  never  been  able  to  determine  just  who  bred  him, 
and  consequently  his  blood  on  the  side  of  the  dam  is  not  fully 
established.  He  was  foaled  about  1840,  got  by  Judson's  Hamble- 
tonian, and  out  of  a  mare  which  Mr.  B.  B.  Sherman  says  was  by 
old  Magnum  Bonum.  He  seems  to  have  known  this  mare  well 
and  speaks  of  her  as  a  very  superior  animal.  This  would  indi- 
cate inbreeding  to  the  Magnum  Bonums,  and  as  they  were  a  light- 
limbed  family  we  may  account  for  this  horse's  defects  in  that  re- 
spect. He  was  owned  a  number  of  years  by  Mr.  Andrus,  of 
Pawlet,  and  passed  into  the  hands  of  G.  A.  Austin,  of  Orwell, 
Vermont.  In  1853-4  Mr.  Austin  sent  him  to  Illinois,  along 
with  Drury's  Ethan  Allen,  Black  Hawk  Prophet,  Morgan  Tiger 
and  some  other  stallions,  in  charge  of  Mr.  Wetherbee,  for  sale. 
In  1854  they  were  removed  to  Muscatine,  Iowa,  and  several  of 
them  sold  there,  among  them  the  Andrus  Horse.  He  was  then  stiff 
in  his  limbs,  showing  the  effects  of  previous  neglect  and  abuse.  He 
died  at  Muscatine  in  1857.  His  progeny  there  were  defective  in 
bone.  I  am  told  several  of  his  daughters  in  Vermont  have  left 


266  THE   HOKSE    OF   AMERICA. 

good  stock  there  and  thus  perpetuated  his  name  in  the  second 
and  third  generations.  But  his  chief  title  to  fame  has  been 
secured  to  him  by  his  renowned  daughter  Princess,  the  dam  of 
the  great  Happy  Medium.  In  1851  Mr.  L.  B.  Adams,  who  then 
owned  her,  bred  the  Isaiah  Wilcox  mare,  by  Burdick's  Engineer, 
son  of  Engineer  by  Messenger,  to  Andrus'  Hambletonian,  and, 
in  a  nutshell,  the  union  of  this  great-grandson  of  Messenger 
with  this  great-granddaughter  of  Messenger  produced  Princess. 
This  pedigree  of  Princess  is  incontrovertibly  established  and  will  be 
given  in  fuller  detail  in  the  history  of  her  son,  Happy  Medium. 


CHAPTER  XXL 

HAMBLETONIAtf  AXD   HIS  FAMILY. 

The  greatest  progenitor  iii  Horse  History — Mr.  Kellogg's  description,  and  com- 
ments thereon — An  analysis  of  Haiubletonian,  structurally  considered — 
His  carriage  and  action — As  a  three-year-old  trotter — Details  of  his  stud 
service — Statistics  of  the  Hainbletonian  family — History  and  ancestry  of 
his  dam,  the  Charles  Kent  Mare — Her  grandson,  Green's  Bashaw  and  his 
dam. 

HAMBLETONIAK,  10. — It  has  been  a  matter  of  constant  regret 
that  in  the  compilation  of  the  first  volume  of  the  Register  I  at- 
tached the  name  "RysdykV  to  this  horse,  and  this  misstep  has 
served  as  a  kind  of  apparent  justification  for  very  many  men  to 
seize  upon  the  name  "Hambletonian,"  with  their  own  name  as  a 
prefix.  This  has  led  to  great  confusion  and  annoyance  to  all 
that  body  of  men  who  have  anything  to  do  with  records  and  cor- 
rect pedigrees.  Fortunately,  however,  the  evil  has  become  so 
apparent  that  many  writers  are  beginning  to  use  the  numbers, 
and  we  now  very  frequently  hear  men  speak  of  "Hambletonian, 
10,"  as  the  true  designation  of  this  horse. 

As  no  horse  of  any  blood  or  period  in  this  or  any  other  country 
has  excited  an  interest  so  universal,  or  represented  such  a  vast 
sum  of  money  in  his  offspring  and  descendants,  I  must  try  to 
give  an  account  of  him  and  his  family — ancestors  and  descend- 
ants— as  full  and  accurate  as  the  materials  at  hand  will  enable 
me.  He  was  a  beautiful  bay  color,  bred  by  Jonas  Seely,  of  Sugar 
Loaf,  Orange  County,  New  York,  foaled  1849,  got  by  Abdallah; 
dam  the  Kent  Mare,  by  imported  Bellfo under;  grandam  One 
Eye,  by  Hambletonian,  son  of  Messenger;  great-grandam  Silver- 
tail,  by  imported  Messenger;  great-great-grandam  Black  Jin, 
breeding  unknown.  He  was  sold  with  his  dam,  when  a  suckling, 
to  Mr.  William  M.  Rysdyk,  of  Chester,  in  the  same  county,  and 
he  remained  his  till  he  died  in  March,  1876.  He  has  been  de- 
scribed by  a  great  many  writers,  but  the  most  minute  and  accu- 
rate description  I  have  ever  seen  is  from  the  pen  of  "Hark  Com- 
.stock"  (Peter  C.  Kellogg),  which  I  will  here  present,  and  after  it 


208  THE   HORSE   OF  AMERICA. 

note  any  point  upon  which  my  own  judgment  differs  from  his.. 
It  should  be  remembered  that  this  description  was  made  when 
the  horse  was  breaking  down  with  the  weight  of  years: 

Hambletonian,  now  twenty-six  years  old,  is  a  rich  deep  mahogany  bay,  with 
black  legs,  the  black  extending  very  high  up  on  the  arms  and  stifles.  His 
mane  was  originally  black,  and  in  his  younger  days  very  ornamental;  rather 
light,  like  that  of  the  blood-horse,  and  of  medium  length,  never  reaching  below 
the  lower  line  of  the  neck,  but  uniform  throughout.  His  foretop  was  always 
light.  At  the  present  time  not  a  vestige  of  either  remains,  they  having 
gradually  disappeared  until  crest  and  crown  are  bald.  His  tail  is  long  and 
full.  When  we  first  knew  him  it  was  very  full,  but  is  also  thinning  with  his 
advancing  years.  The  hair  of  both  was  black  as  a  raven's  wing,  and  entirely 
devoid  of  wave  or  curl.  His  marks  are  a  very  small  star  and  two  white  ankles 
behind,  but  the  coronets  being  dotted  with  black  spots,  the  hoofs  are  mainly 
dark.  Muzzle  dark.  Head  large  and  bony,  with  profile  inclining  to  the  Roman 
order;  jowl  deep;  jaws  not  as  wide  apart  as  in  some  of  his  descendants,  yet  not- 
deficient.  Eye  very  large  and  prominent,  and  countenance  generally  animated 
and  expressive  of  good  temper.  We  found  him  to  measure  10^  inches  across 
the  face.  Ear  large,  well  set,  and  lively.  Neck  rather  short  and  a  little  heavy 
at  the  throatlatch,  but  thin  and  clean  at  the  crest.  His  shoulders  are  very 
oblique,  deep  andstrong;  withers  low  and  broad;  sway  very  short,  and  coupling 
smooth.  The  great  fillets  of  muscle  running  back  along  the  spine  give  extraor- 
dinary width  and  strength  to  the  loin,  which  threatens  to  lose  the  closely-set 
hip  in  the  wealth  of  its  embrace.  But  it  is  back  of  here  that  we  find  lodged 
the  immense  and  powerful  machinery  that,  imparted  to  his  sons  and  daughters, 
has  ever  placed  them  in  the  foremost  ranks  of  trotters.  His  hip  is  long  and 
croup  high,  with  great  length  from  hip-point  to  hock.  Thighs  and  stifles 
swelling  with  the  sinewy  muscle,  which  extends  well  down  into  his  large, 
clean,  bony  hocks,  hung  near  the  ground.  Below  these  the  leg  is  broad,  flat, 
and  clean,  with  the  tendons  well  detached  from  the  bone,  and  drops  at  a  con- 
siderable angle  with  the  upper  part  of  the  limb,  giving  the  well-bent  rather 
than  the  straight  hock.  Pasterns  long,  but  strong  and  elastic,  and  let  into 
hoofs  that  are  perfection.  In  front  his  limbs  in  strength  and  muscular  develop- 
ment comport  with  the  rear  formation.  His  chest  is  broad  and  prominent;  his 
forelegs  stand  wide  apart  (perhaps  in  part  the  result  of  much  covering),  and  he 
is  deep  through  the  heart;  yet  notwithstanding  this,  and  the  fact  of  his  round- 
ness of  barrel,  there  is  no  appearence  of  heaviness  or  hampered  action. 

Taken  at  a  glance,  the  impressive  features  of  the  horse  are  his  immense  sub- 
stance, without  a  particle  of  coarseness  or  grossness.  No  horse  we  can  recall 
has  so  great  a  volume  of  bone,  with  the  same  apparent  firmness  of  texture  and 
true  blood-like  quality.  Though  short-backed,  he  is  very  long  underneath. 
Indeed,  he  is  a  horse  of  greater  than  apparent  length.  We  found  his  measure- 
ment from  breast  to  breeching,  in  a  straight  line,  greater  by  four  inches  than 
his  height  at  the  withers — a  very  unusual  excess.  We  also  found  him  two 
inches  higher  over  the  rump  than  at  the  withers,  and  the  whole  rear,  or 
propelling  portion  of  the  machinery,  would  upon  measurement  seem  to  have 
been  molded  for  an  animal  two  sizes  larger  than  the  one  to  which  it  is  at- 


HAMBLETOXIAtf    AND    HIS    FAMILY.  269 

tached;  yet  so  beautifully  is  its  .connection  effected  with  the  whole  that  there 
is  no  disproportion  apparent,  either  in  the  symmetry  or  the  action  of  the  horse. 
As  an  evidence  of  the  immense  reach  which  this  admirable  rear  construction 
enables  him  to  obtain,  it  is  often  noticed  by  visitors  that  in  his  favorite  attitude, 
as  he  stands  in  his  box,  his  off  hind  foot  is  thrown  forward  so  far  under  him  as 
to  nearly  touch  the  one  in  front  of  it — an  attitude  which  few  horses  of  his  pro- 
portionate length  could  take  without  an  apparent  strain,  yet  which  he  assumes 
at  perfect  repose.  When  led  out  upon  the  ground  his  walk  strikes  one  as 
being  different  from  that  of  any  other  horse.  It  cannot  be  described  further 
than  to  say  that  it  shows  a  true  and  admirable  adjustment  of  parts,  and  a  per- 
fect pliability  and  elasticity  of  mechanism  that  shows  out  through  every 
movement.  Many  have  noticed  and  endeavored  to  account  in  different  ways 
for  the  peculiarity,  some  crediting  it  to  the  pliable  pastern,  others  to  surplus 
of  knee  and  hock  action,  et  -.  •  but  the  fact  is,  there  seems  to  be  a  suppleness  of 
the  whole  conformation  that  delights  to  express  itself  in  every  movement  and 
action  of  the  horse.  "In  his  box,"  said  a  Kentucky  horseman,  who  recently 
looked  him  over,  "  I  thought  him  too  massive  to  be  active,  but  the  moment  he 
stepped  out  I  saw  that  he  was  all  action." 

There  is  so  much  in  the  foregoing  description  that  is  intelli- 
gent and  just  that  I  hardly  feel  like  reviewing  a  single  phrase. 
In  judging  of  the  conformation  of  a  horse  and  determining 
whether  it  is  good  or  bad,  at  different  points,  we  must  have  in 
our  mind  some  ideal  standard,  by  which  we  mentally  compare 
one  thing  with  another.  The  popular  conception  of  the  perfect 
horse  is  the  picture  of  the  "Arabian,"  painted  by  artists  who 
never  saw  an  Arabian  horse.  The  next  approach  to  perfection  is 
the  English  race  horse,  but  others  may  insist  that  the  Clydesdale 
•comes  nearer  perfection  and  that  he  should  be  the  ideal  with 
which  the  standard  of  comparison  should  be  made.  It  is  unfor- 
tunate that  Mr.  Kellogg  should  have  described  Hambletonian  as 
possessing  "immense  substance,  without  a  particle  of  coarseness, 
or  grossness."  He  had  a  remarkably  coarse  head  in  its  size  and 
outline,  but  this  is  greatly  softened  by  saying  "with  a  profile 
inclining  to  the  Roman  order."  The  ideal  muzzle  of  the  Eng- 
lish race  horse  is  so  fine  that,  figuratively  speaking,  he  can  drink 
out  of  a  tin  cup,  but  Hambletonian  could  not  get  his  muzzle  into 
a  vessel  of  much  smaller  dimensions  than  a  half -bushel  measure. 
"Ear  large,  well  set  and  lively.'*'  This  is  true  as  to  the  size  of 
the  ears,  but  not  correct,  in  my  judgment,  as  to  the  setting  on. 
As  they  habitually  lopped  backward  when  in  repose,  giving  a 
sour  and  ill-tempered  expression,  I  co^ld  not  concede  that  they 
were  "well  set."  The  hocks  were  good  and  clean,  but  the 
abrupt  angle  at  that  point  was  certainly  a  coarse  feature.  The 


2 70  THE   HOUSE   OF   AMERICA. 

round  meaty  withers  and  the  round  meaty  buttocks  were  both 
"coarse  and  gross"  when  looked  at  from  the  point  of  good  breed- 
ing. His  two  great,  meaty  ends,  connected  with  a  long  and  per- 
fect barrel,  two  or  three  sizes  too  small  for  the  ends,  showed  such 
a  marked  disproportion  that  I  often  wondered  at  it.  Not  one  of 
these  criticisms  is  made  in  the  sense  of  a  criticism  of  Mr.  Kel- 
logg's  description,  but  merely  as  the  expression  of  a  different 
view  on  some  points,  and  on  those  points  not  mentioned  I  most 
heartily  agree  with  him.  He  has  omitted  to  give  the  height  of 
the  horse  for  the  reason  that  he  had  shrunken  from  his  normal 
height  just  one  inch.  When  at  his  best  he  measured  fifteen 
hands  one  inch  and  a  quarter.  This  shrinkage,  in  addition  to^ 
the  ordinary  results  of  great  age,  is  thus  explained  by  Mr.  Guy 
Miller,  who  knew  him  better  than  any  other  man  except  his* 
owner.  "His  splendid  fore  hoofs  had  been  ruined  by  an  opera- 
tion whereby  the  arch  was  lost  and  the  horse  during  the  remain- 
der of  his  days  stood  on  his  frogs."  He  was  two  inches  higher 
on  the  hips  than  on  the  withers. 

When  the  horse  was  led  out  his  movements  were  so  friction- 
less  and  faultless  that  he  impressed  me  as  the  most  wonderful 
horse  that  I  had  ever  seen.  He  seemed  as  supple  as  a  cat  witk 
the  power  of  an  elephant.  As  he  walked  he  kept  pushing  those 
crooked  hind  legs  away  under  him  in  a  manner  that  gave  him  a 
motion  peculiarly  his  own,  and  suggested  the  immense  possibili- 
ties of  his  stride  when  opened  out  on  a  trot.  Plain  and  indeed 
homely  as  he  was  he  was  a  most  interesting  and  instructive  study 
whether  in  his  box  or  taking  his  daily  walks.  The  question  has 
been  asked  a  thousand  times  whether  the  speed  of  Hambletonian 
had  been  developed  and  how  fast  he  could  go.  This  question 
I  considered  very  important,  in  a  philosophical  and  breeding 
sense,  and  in  starting  in  to  investigate  it  I  found  two  statements, 
one  that  the  time  made  at  the  Union  Course  was  honest  and  true, 
and  the  other  that  it  was  a  "put  up  job"  to  make  Mr.  Rysdyk 
feel  good,  and  that  the  time  in  fact  was  much  slower  than  that 
announced.  Each  side  had  its  advocates,  and  it  did  not  take 
long  to  discover  that  the  enemies  of  Mr.  Rysdyk  were  all  on  one 
side  and  the  more  bitter  their  enmity  the  more  blatant  they  were 
in  denying  the  truth  of  the  time  given  out  for  the  performance. 
This  party  was  headed  by  one  "J.  M.,"  long  distinguished,  and 
will  be  long  remembered  in  Orange  County,  for  the  virulence  of 


HAMBLETONIAN   AND    HIS   FAMILY.  271 

his  dislike  to  Mr.  Rysdyk,  and  as  the  most  unreliable  of  all  unre^ 
liable  horsemen. 

In  the  autumn  of  1852  Mr.  Rysdyk  and  Mr.  Seely  C.  Roe,  the 
owner  of  Roe's  Abdallah  Chief,  then  four  years  old,  concluded  to 
exhibit  their  sons  of  Abdallah  at  the  fair  of  the  American  Insti- 
tute, in  New  York,  and  after  the  fair  to  take  their  colts,  three 
and  four  years  old  respectively,  for  a  light  training  for  a  few 
weeks.  The  programme  was  carried  out,  and  after  reaching  the 
course  they  started  the  two  colts  together,  and  much  to  Mr. 
Roe's  surprise  Hambletonian  beat  his  colt  in  3:03.  In  a  short 
time  Mr.  Roe  gave  his  colt  another  trial  in  2:55^.  A  few  days 
later  Mr.  Rysdyk  drove  his  colt  in  2:48.  Believing  then  he  had 
the  making  of  the  best  trotter  in  the  world  and  being  thoroughly 
homesick,  he  packed  up  his  traps  and  started  for  Orange  County, 
and  this  was  the  first  and  the  last  training  that  Hambletonian 
ever  had.  When  we  consider  the  age  of  the  colt  and  how  few 
of  that  age  had  then  ever  reached  that  mark,  the  little  then 
known  by  amateurs  of  the  arts  of  training  and  driving,  and  the 
very  limited  preparation,  we  must  conclude  that  this  was  a  re- 
markably good  performance. 

Was  it  honestly  made?  Mr.  Roe  has  been  dead  a  good  many 
years,  but  the  next  day  after  he  returned  from  Long  Island  with 
Mr.  Rysdyk  he  called  at  the  house  of  his  brother-in-law,  David  R. 
Feagles,  a  very  responsible  man,  and  in  the  course  of  the  conver- 
sation he  asked  Mr.  Feagles  if  he  had  heard  the  news?  "No," 
said  Mr.  Feagles,  "what  is  it?"  "Rysdyk's  colt  trotted  the 
Union  Course  in  2:48.  I  held  my  watch  and  I  know  it  is  true." 
Mr.  Roe  was  always  steadfast  and  immovable  in  this  declaration 
while  he  lived.  Mr.  W.  H.  Wood,  the  breeder  of  Abdallah  Chief, 
says  he  told  him  the  time  was  2:48,  and  he  had  several  times 
heard  it  disputed  in  Mr.  Roe's  presence  and  he  had  always  settled 
the  dispute  by  giving  the  same  fact.  Mr.  David  R.  Seely  said 
he  could  not  remember  the  time  made,  but  he  had  heard  the 
matter  disputed,  and  Mr.  Roe  settled  it  by  saying  it  was  true,  that 
he  saw  it  and  held  the  watch  on  him  when  he  did  it.  These  men 
were  as  reliable  as  any  in  Orange  County  and  their  statement  of 
Mr.  Roe's  assertions  cannot  be  doubted.  Considering  the  cir- 
cumstances, it  will  occur  to  any  mind  that  Mr.  Roe  was  the  very 
best  witness  to  the  truth  of  this  performance  that  could  be  pro- 
duced. He  was  not  only  disinterested,  but  in  building  up  the 
reputation  of  a  rival  stallion  he  was  testifying  to  his  own  hurt. 


272  THE    HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

There  are  other  evidences  of  Hambletonian's  development  and 
speed,  but  nothing  so  definite  as  the  foregoing.  He  was  driven 
in  double  team  sometimes  with  the  great  trotter  Sir  Walter.  Mr. 
Kinner,  at  one  time  owner  of  Sir  Walter  and  other  good  ones,  a 
horseman  of  experience  and  knowledge  of  trotting  affairs,  assured 
me  that  Sir  AValter  had  shoAvn  a  trial  at  Centerville  track  to 
wagon  in  2:32,  and  this  was  before  he  was  driven  double,  occa- 
sionally, with  Hambletonian;  and  that  Hambletonian  could  out- 
foot  Sir  W alter  for  the  first  half-mile,  but  as  the  young  horse 
was  green  and  unseasoned,  he  could  not  keep  up  the  clip  to  the 
finish.  He  did  not  hesitate  to  express  the  belief  that  the  team 
could  have  trotted  the  mile  in  considerably  less  than  2:40.  There 
is  one  fact  in  connection  with  the  trial  at  Union  Course  that  I 
have  omitted  in  its  proper  place.  Mr.  Rysdyk  was  a  remarkably 
careful  man  and  always  aimed  to  be  inside  of  the  truth  rather 
than  beyond  it.  He  advertised  his  horse  as  having  made  the 
trial  in  2:48-|,  as  it  is  probable  some  of  the  watches  gave  that  as 
the  time,  instead  of  2:48  flat. 

Like  all  the  Abdallah  family,  Hambletonian  matured  early,  and 
at  three  years  was  as  well  advanced  as  many  colts  a  year  older. 
His  stud  services  commenced  early.  When  two  years  old  he  was 
allowed  to  cover  four  mares  without  fee  and  he  got  three  colts, 
one  of  which  was  afterward  known  as  the  famous  Alexander's 
Abdallah.  When  three  years  old  he  was  offered  for  public 
patronage  at  twenty-five  dollars  to  insure,  and  he  covered  seven- 
teen mares  and  got  thirteen  colts.  The  next  season,  at  the  same 
price,  he  covered  one  hundred  and  one  mares  and  got  seventy- 
eight  colts.  The  next  season  (1854),  being  then  five  years  old, 
the  price  was  advanced  to  thirty-five  dollars,  and  he  covered 
eighty-eight  mares,  getting  sixty-three  foals.  The  price  re- 
mained at  thirty-five  dollars  till  1863,  when  it  was  advanced  to 
seventy-five  dollars.  At  which  price  he  covered  one  hundred 
and  fifty  mares.  The  next  season  the  price  was  advanced  to  one 
hundred  dollars,  and  he  covered  two  hundred  and  seventeen 
mares,  getting  one  hundred  and  forty-eight  foals.  In  1865  the 
price  was  advanced  to  three  hundred  dollars  and  one  hundred 
and  ninety-three  mares  were  covered.  In  1866  the  price  was  put 
at  five  hundred  dollars  and  one  hundred  and  five  mares  were 
covered.  At  this  price  his  services  remained  ever  afterward- 
one  hundred  dollars  down  and  the  remainder  when  the  mare 
proved  in  foal.  In  1867  he  covered  seventy-seven  mares  and  got 


HAMBLETOX1AX    AND    HIS   FAMILY.  273 

only  forty-one  foals.  This  large  percentage  of  failure  indicated 
beyond  question  that  his  procreative  powers  had  been  overtaxed 
and  that  there  was  a  general  letting  down  of  his  vital  energies. 
In  1868  he  was  not  allowed  to  cover  any  mares.  In  1869  he 
again  manifested  his.  usual  vigor  and  he  covered  twenty-one 
mares,  getting  fourteen  foals.  In  1870  he  covered  twenty-two 
mares  and  got  thirteen  foals.  From  this  time  forward  his  pro- 
creative  powers  dwindled,  and  in  1875,  I  think,  he  got  but  two 
foals,  and  died  the  following  March. 

It  has  been  estimated  that  he  got  about  one  thousand  three 
hundred  foals,  and  for  several  years  it  was  one  of  the  amusing 
features  of  horse  literature  to  see  how  many  writers  were  able  to 
demonstrate  that  as  a  progenitor  of  speed  he  was  a  failure.  This 
item  of  one  thousand  three  hundred  foals  was  taken  as  the  basis 
of  computation,  and  then  with  the  small  number  of  forty  trotters 
out  of  the  one  thousand  three  hundred,  the  percentage  of  trotters 
was  very  small.  The  next  step  was  to  find  some  unknown  horse, 
generally  a  pacer,  that  had  only  two  or  three  foals  to  his  credit 
and  one  of  them  had  made  a  record  of  2:30,  thus  showing  a  much 
larger  percentage  than  Hambletonian,  and  by  that  much  he  was  a 
greater  sire  than  Hambletonian.  All  this  foolishness  has  now 
subsided  in  the  face  of  the  fact  that  the  great  mass  of  the  trot- 
ters of  to-day  have  more  or  less  of  his  blood  in  their  veins,  and  in 
a  very  short  time  that  blood  will  abound  in  greater  or  less 
strength  in  every  American  trotter.  The  tables  which  here 
follows  will  make  this  fact  evident  to  all  who  will  study  them. 

[Prefatory  to  these  tables  and  to  the  other  statistics  concerning  the  present 
rank  of  the  trotting  families  given  in  the  pages  following,  an  explanatory 
paragraph  is  in  order  so  that  they  may  not  be  misunderstood.  (1)  They  are 
based  on  the  tables  given  in  the  Year  Book  for  1896,  and  I  regret  to  say  that 
these  tables  are  so  emasculated,  incomplete,  unsatisfactory  and  in  many  cases 
contradictory  one  of  the  other  that  it  is  literally  impossible  to  compile  from 
them  statistics  that  may  be  accepted  as  absolutely  correct  and  letter  perfect. 
However,  as  this  work  is  not  intended  as  one  for  statistical  reference,  the  tables 
being  approximately  correct  serve  my  purpose,  which  is  merely  to  show  rel- 
atively and  with  substantial  accuracy  the  standing  of  the  sires  and  families 
embraced  to  the  close  of  1896.  (2)  By  the  term  "  standard  performers  "  is  meant 
horses  that  have  acquired  trotting  records  of  2:30  or  better,  or  pacing  records  of 
2:25  or  better.  The  Year  Book  no  longer  gives  a  2:30  pacing  list,  and  it  should 
be  noted  that  pacers  with  records  between  2:30  and  2:25  are  not  credited  in 
these  tables.  (3)  The  tables  are  designed  to  show  (a)  the  number  of  standard 
performers  got  by  each  sire  named.  (6)  The  number  of  his  sons  that  are  sires  of 
standard  performers,  (c)  The  number  of  his  daughters  that  are  dams  of 


274 


THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 


standard  performers,  (d)  The  number  of  standard  performers  produced  by- 
these  sons  and  daughters,  and  finally,  in  the  last  column,  the  total  number  o" 
standard  performers  produced  in  the  two  generations — i.  e.,  by  the  sire  himself, 
and  by  his  sons  and  daughters.  The  dates  of  foaling  and  death  are  important 
in  considering  the  opportunities  of  the  families  embraced.] 

The  first  table  following  gives  .some  idea  of  the  supremacy  of 
the  Hambletonian  family  over  all  others.  When  we  seek  a  rival 
to  Hambletonian  as  a  trotting  progenitor  we  must  do  so  among 
his  sons;  and  by  turning  to  the  second  table  it  will  be  noted  that 
many  of  these  outrank  the  founders  of  any  and  all  the  other 
great  trotting  families. 


FOUNDERS  OF  THE  GREAT  TROTTING  FAMILIES. 


E 

t 

S>* 

'S.S  g 

<D 

a 

8 

£ 

>-l         ,      rj 

'c     -2 

Name. 

•d 

-d 

1 

8 
a 

«*>* 
s  ^ 

||| 

l|| 

. 

«2 

13 

«J 

o 

o 

*     &M     0J 

55  £  o 

i 

i 

a 

1 

1 

a  ®  cc  *s 

1  IB 

>H 

>H 

02 

& 

PH 

£ 

H 

Hambletonian 

1849 

1876 

40 

148 

80 

1665 

1705 

Blue  Bull  

1858 

1880 

60 

47 

77 

211 

271 

Mambrino  Chief  

1844 

1862 

6 

23 

17 

119 

125 

Ethan  Allen 

1849 

1876 

6 

22 

18 

118 

Pilot  Jr  

1858 

1865 

8 

6 

18 

72 

80 

George  M.  Patchen   

1849 

1864 

4 

15 

4 

70 

74 

Champion  (807) 

1853 

1874 

8 

6 

7 

53 

61 

In  this  table  Ethan  Allen  is  given  as  the  representative  of  his 
family  in  preference  to  his  sire,  Black  Hawk,  the  real  founder,, 
for  the  reasons  that  he  was  a  far  greater  horse,  and  makes  a  bet- 
ter showing  than  his  sire,  and  further  because  he  was  a  contem- 
porary of  Hambletonian.  For  exactly  the  same  reasons 
George  M.  Patchen  is  given  as  the  representative  progenitor  of 
the  Clay  line. 

The  next  table  demonstrates  what  the  Hambletonian  family  has 
done  in  the  second  and  third  generations,  and  the  relative  stand- 
ing of  the  leading  sub-families  of  the  greatest  trotting  line.  It 
embraces  separately  every  sire  that  has  to  his  own  credit  and  to 
the  credit  of  his  sons  and  daughters  an  aggregate  of  fifty  or  more 
standard  performers,  twenty-three  in  all,  while  the  totals  to  the; 


HAMBLETOXIAN    AND    HIS    FAMILY. 


275- 


credit  of  all  the  other  sons  of  Hambletonian  are  grouped  in  the 
last  line: 

FAMILIES   OF   HAMBLETONIAN'S    SONS. 


Name. 

'i 
1 
8 

Year  died. 

Standard 
performers. 

Producing  sons. 

Producing 
daughters. 

e*| 

Z'Z* 

ii-3 

e.^'g 

•gsS 
•3S-SE 

G  s-  o  a; 

a  «  s  £ 

02 

Total  No.  standard 
performers  in 
two  generations. 

George  Wi  Ikes  

1856  1882 
18681890 
1863  1888 
1864  1893 
18631893 
1854  1888 
1866  1895 
185211865 
1866  1892 
1875  

83 
154 
92 
44 
52 
34 
71 
5 
45 
75 
23 
13 
14 
29 
31 
15 
28 
35 
8 
14 
23 
31 
16 
618 

94 
65 
51 
43 
44 
40 
26 
14 
25 
25 
24 
12 
20 
14 
13 
15 
17 
4 
9 
9 
9 
6 
9 
229 

81 
43 
47 
45 
42 
48 
54 
29 
19 
18 
41 
16 
44 
28 
13 
36 
16 
20 
14 
11 
14 
9 
15 
412 

1801 
493 
272 
248 
234 
221 
158 
199 
110 
74 
125 
112 
93 
76 
64 
74 
57 
39 
57 
49 
35 
20 
34 
980 

1884 
647 
364 
292 
286 
255 
229 
204 
155 
149 
148 
125 
107 
105 
95 
89 
85 
74 
65 
63 
58 
51 
50 
1600 

Happy  Medium                    ... 

Harold     .     . 

Volunteer                            .... 

Strathmore           .......   

Abdallah  (15)  

Aberdeen                    .               .  .    

Egbert 

1865 
1855 
1863 
1864 
1867 
1868 
1868 
1867 
1863 
1860 
1866 
1867 
1866 

189- 
1878 
1892 
1894 
189- 
1894 
189- 
189- 
1873 
1891 
1891 
189- 
189- 

Ed  ward  Everett                         

Administrator     

Victor  Bismarck 

Cuvler 

{Sweepstakes 

Sentinel             .          ....          .      ... 

Middletown  

Sou  ire  Talmage 

Dauntless             ... 

Echo         

Other  sons  (125) 

• 

This  table  shows  what  each  horse  himself  produced,  and  how 
his  blood  is  breeding  on  through  his  sons  and  daughters;  and 
above  all  it  demonstrates  the  stupendous  fact  that  in  three  gen- 
erations the  Hambletonian  family  has  produced  upward  of  seven 
thousand  standard  performers,  and  all  facts  and  all  experience 
now  beyond  cavil  justify  what  I  ventured  to  declare  in  Wallace's 
Monthly  many  years  ago:  "The  Hambletonian  line  stands  above 
all  other  lines  and  must  survive  because  it  is  the  fittest." 

THE  CHAKLES  KENT  MARE,  dam  of  Hambletonian,  was  a  bay, 
fifteen  and  three-quarter  hands  high,  with  a  star,  left  forward 
ankle  roan,  and  left  hind  foot  white.  Her  son  was  long  and 
round,  just  the  opposite  of  her  sire.  Hips  rather  coarse,  and  might- 


276  THE   HOKSE    OF    AMERICA. 

be  considered  a  little  ragged.  Stifles  very  powerful  and  well- 
developed.  Her  hocks  and  legs  were  exactly  represented  in  her 
son  Hambletonian.  Her  neck  was  fine  and  bloodlike,  but  not 
long.  Her  head  was  good,  and  her  eyes  remarkably  full  and 
bright,  showing  considerable  white.  Her  mane  was  long,  but 
thin,  and  her  tail  was  light.  Her  shoulders  were  well-sloped, 
her  withers  ran  up  high,  and  were  thin.  Jonas  Seely,  Sr.,  hav- 
ing given  the  old  mare  One  Eye  to  his  son  Charles,  she  was  sold 
to  Josiah  S.  Jackson,  of  Oxford,  Orange  County.  Mr.  Jackson 
bred  her  to  Bellfounder  and  the  produce  was  the  Kent  mare. 
Although  the  Seely  family  owned  the  stock,  originally  and  after- 
ward, Mr.  Jackson  was  really  the  breeder  of  this  mare.  Mr. 
Jonas  Seely  says  she  was  got  the  year  Bellfounder  stood  at 
Poughkeepsie  (1831),  but  Mr.  Rysdyk  says  she  was  got  in  1832, 
when  Bellfounder  stood  at  Washingtonville.  Mr.  Jackson  sold 
her  at  three  years  old  to  Peter  Seely  for  three  hundred  dollars; 
Mr.  Seely  sold  her  soon  after  to  Mr.  Pray,  of  New  York,  for 
four  hundred  dollars;  Mr.  Pray  sold  her  to  William  Chi  vis  for 
five  hundred  dollars;  and  Mr.  Chi  vis  sold  her  to  a  gentleman, 
who  was  a  banker  in  New  York — name  not  remembered — to 
match  another  as  a  fast  road  team.  This  team  ran  away  after  a 
time,  and  she  was  injured,  and  became  lame.  Charles  Kent,  a 
hutcher  in  New  York,  then  bought  her  and  bred  her  to  Webber's 
Tom  Thumb,  before  he  came  to  Orange  County.  At  this  junc- 
ture, on  the  earnest  recommendation  of  Mr.  Pray,  who  had 
tested  the  quality  of  three  or  four  of  the  family,  Mr.  Jonas  Seely 
— Jonas,  second — bought  the  mare  of  Kent  for  one  hundred  and 
thirty-five  dollars,  and  took  her  back  to  the  old  place,  where  she 
was  bred  and  produced  as  follows: 

1843.  Brown  filly  Belle,  by  Webber's  Tom  Thumb. 

1845.  Black  gelding,  by  Webber's  Tom  Thumb. 

1846.  Chestnut  filly  (died  at  4  years  old),  by  Abdallah. 

1848.  Brown  filly  (died  at  4  years  old),  by  Abdallah. 

1849.  Bay  colt   Hambletonian,  by  Abdallah  (mare  and  colt  sold  to  William 

M.  Rysdyk,  for  $125). 

1850.  Brown  filly  (went  to  Maryland),  by  Young  Patriot. 

1851.  Lost  foal,  by  L.  I.  Black  Hawk. 

1852.  Brown  colt  Tippoo  Saib,  by  Brook's  Black  Hawk. 

1853.  Chestnut  colt  (died  young),  by  Fiddler. 
1856.  Brown  gelding,  by  Plato. 

1859.  Bay  colt,  by  Almack,  son  of  Hambletonian. 


HAMBLETOXIAX    AXD    HIS    FAMILY.  277 

In  the  preceding  list  there  are  but  two  fillies  that  lived  to  produce 
anything,  and  one  of  them  is  lost  from  sight.  The  produce  of 
the  first  will  be  given  below.  The  Patriot  filly  that  went  to 
Maryland  was  a  brown,  and  of  good  size,  but  nothing  further  is 
known  of  her. 

The  Tom  Thumb  gelding  of  1845  was  in  1869  a  good  road 
horse,  and  was  owned  by  George  S.  Conklin.  He  was  showy  and 
stylish  without  very  much  speed.  Her  fifth  foal,  Hambletonian, 
is  known  wherever  the  trotting  horse  is  known. 

This  mare  was  a  trotter  of  no  ordinary  merit.  She  was  never 
in  any  races,  so  far  as  known,  except  they  might  have  been  of  a 
private  nature,  but  after  she  passed  into  the  hands  of  Peter 
Seely  her  speed  was  pretty  well  developed.  This  is  not  only 
shown  by  the  advance  in  her  price  from  owner  to  owner,  but  it 
appears  to  be  a  well-established  fact  that  when  four  years  old 
Peter  Seely  had  her  at  the  Union  Course,  and  he  there  gave  her 
two  trials  to  saddle,  the  first  in  2:43  and  the  second  in  2:41. 
For  a  time  I  was  skeptical  about  these  trials,  but  they  seem  to  be 
beyond  question.  This  is  considerably  faster  than  any  other  of 
the  get  of  imported  Bellfounder  ever  trotted  in  this  country, 
and  from  this  we  may  conclude  that  her  inheritance  from  her 
dam  was  the  great  factor  in  her  speed. 

OXE  EYE,  the  dam  of  the  Kent  mare,  was  a  brown,  about 
fifteen  hands  and  an  inch  high,  with  two  white  feet  and  perhaps 
a  little  white  in  her  face.  With  the  taste  Mr.  Seely  had  of  the 
Messenger  blood  in  Silvertail  he  wanted  more  of  it;  and  when 
Townsend  Cock  sent  the  famous  Bishop's  Hambletonian  to 
Goshen  in  1814,  Mr.  Seely  bred  his  daughter  of  Messenger  to 
this  son  of  Messenger  and  the  produce  was  One  Eye.  I  do  not 
learn  that  this  mare  was  handsome,  but  she  was  an  animal  of 
most  remarkable  courage  and  endurance.  The  load  was  never 
too  heavy  nor  the  road  too  long.  Withal,  she  had  a  will  of  her 
own  and  was  a  little  hard  to  manage  unless  she  was  worked  con- 
stantly. One  day  when  on  her  mettle  she  got  an  eye  knocked 
out  by  accident,  and,  hence,  her  name;  but  the  great  quality  of 
this  mare  was  her  remarkable  trotting  action.  Those  familiar 
with  her  gait,  and  entirely  competent  to  judge,  are  enthusiastic 
in  the  opinion  that  no  trotter  of  the  present  day  ever  surpassed 
her  in  a  grand  open  trotting  step.  If  the  patience  and  skill 
brought  into  use  in  developing  the  modern  trotter  had  been  ex- 
pended on  her,  she  doubtless  would  have  surpassed  all  of  her 


'278  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

day,  not  even  excepting  her  near  relation,  old  Topgallant.  This 
mare  illustrates  a  point  of  very  great  importance.  She  was  got 
by  a  son  of  Messenger  that  was  a  running  horse  of  merit  and  able 
to  beat  some  of  the  best  of  his  day,  and  her  dam  was  a  daughter 
of  Messenger.  The  trotting  action  of  neither  sire  nor  dam  had 
ever  been  developed,  but  when  these  two  Messengers  came  to- 
gether, the  clean,  open,  unmistakable  trotting  gait  was  the  result. 
Right  at  this  point  and  in  this  mare,  One  Eye,  we  have  the  in- 
cipient cause  of  all  Hambletonian's  greatness.  This  mare  was 
bred  by  Jonas  Seely,  Sr. ;  given  to  his  son  Charles,  who  sold  her 
to  his  brother-in-law,  Josiah  Jackson,  of  Oxford  in  Orange 
County.  According  the  recollection  of  Mr.  Rysdyk,  who  was 
entirely  familiar  with  the  Seely  family  and  their  affairs,  she  pro- 
duced as  follows: 

1829.  Bay  gelding  Crabstick,  by  Seagull. 

1830.  Bay  gelding  Pray  Colt,  by  Seagull. 

1331.  Bay  filly  Young  One  Eye,  by  Edmund  Seely's  horse  Orphan  Boy. 

1833.  Bay  filly  Kent  Mare,  by  imp.  Bellfounder.     Sold  to  Mr.  Pray. 

1834.  Bay  filly;  sold  also  to  Mr.  Pray,  by  imp.    Bellfounder.    Perhaps  there 

was  another  foal  that  died. 

The  first  of  her  foals,  Crabstick,  appears  to  have  been  well- 
named.  His  temper  was  anything  but  smooth  and  pleasant.  He 
was  sold  early  to  Mr.  Ebenezer  Pray,  of  New  York,  and  he  soon 
evinced  two  traits  of  character  that  did  not  elevate  him  in  the 
estimation  of  his  owner.  He  would  throw  every  one  off  that 
dared  to  mount  him,  and  when  they  did  get  him  under  motion 
he  was  determined  to  pace  and  not  trot.  On  a  certain  occasion 
Mr.  Rysdyk  visited  Mr.  Pray,  and  he  was  urged  to  try  his  skill 
in  riding  Crabstick  and  see  if  he  could  make  him  trot.  The  at- 
tempt was  long-continued,  and  embraced  up  hill,  down  hill,  and 
level  work,  but  all  to  no  purpose,  as  pace  he  would.  At  last  Mr. 
Pray  proposed  to  put  him  over  rails  and  stakes,  placed  on  the 
road  at  intervals  of  a  good  trotting  stride,  and  see  if  that  would 
make  him  quit  moving  one  side  at  a  time.  Mr.  Rysdyk  went  up 
the  road  and  got  under  good  headway,  but  just  before  he  reached 
the  rails  the  horse  threw  him.  He  was  not  much  hurt,  mounted 
again,  and  then  commenced  in  earnest  the  fight  for  the  mastery 
between  the  horse  and  his  rider.  The  value  of  a  neck  was  noth- 
ing when  compared  with  the  great  question  of  who  should  con- 
quer. The  next  attempt  was  successful,  and  he  went  over  the 
rails  flying.  The  intervals  between  them  were  then  extended,  and 


HAMBLETOXIAX    AXD    HIS    FAMILY.  279 

he  was  kept  at  that  most  dangerous  exercise  till  he  would  trot 
without  rails,  and  until  both  horse  and  rider  were  completely 
-exhausted.  The  horse  was  conquered,  and  although  always 
willful  and  hard  to  manage,  ever  after,  when  called  on  to  trot,  he 
would  do  it.  Mr.  Pray  sold  him  to  Mr.  Vanderbilt,  and,  al- 
though kept  as  a  private  driving  horse,  he  was  fast  for  his  day, 
.and  could  go  in  less  than  three  minutes  at  any  time. 

Her  next  foal  was  sold  also  to  Mr.  Pray  when  five  years  old, 
and  was  known  as  the  Pray  Colt.  He  was  marked  just  as  his 
brother  Crabstick,  and,  like  him,  was  somewhat  vicious  and  hard 
to  manage. 

The  third  foal,  Young  One  Eye,  was  by  Edmund  Seely's  horse 
Orphan  Boy,  whose  pedigree  is  not  now  known.  One  of  her  eyes 
was  knocked  out  by  Peter  Seely,  accidentally,  when  breaking  her, 
just  as  her  dam  had  lost  an  eye.  She  passed  out  of  the  hands  of 
the  Seely  family  and  her  subsequent  history  is  unknown.  If  this 
mare  ever  produced  anything,  her  history  and  that  of  her  de- 
scendants would  be  of  great  interest  and  value. 

The  question  at  once  suggests  itself,  Where  did  Crabstick  get 
his  pacing  action?  It  could  not  have  been  from  his  sire,  as  he  was 
a  son  of  Duroc,  so  said,  but  it  may  have  come  from  Seagull's 
•dam,  as  we  know  nothing  of  her  breeding;  or  it  may  have  come 
from  old  Black  Jin,  the  dam  of  Silvertail.  If  from  neither  of 
these  we  must  then  conclude  it  came  from  Messenger  himself,  or 
rather,  through  him  from  some  of  his  pacing  ancestors.  It  is 
.altogether  probable  that  the  strong  infusion  of  pacing  blood  in 
Messenger's  veins  was  the  real  element  that  made  him  a  trotting 
progenitor  when  every  other  imported  English  horse  failed  in 
that  respect. 

Silvertail,  the  great-grandam  of  Hambletonian,  was  a  dark 
brown  mare  with  white  hind  feet  and  a  white  face.  She  had  a 
great  many  white  hairs  in  her  tail  and  hence  she  was  called 
Silvertail.  She  was  foaled  in  1802  and  was  bred  by  Mr.  Jonas 
Seely,  Sr.,  of  Sugar  Loaf,  Orange  County,  New  York.  She  was 
_got  by  imported  Messenger  in  1801,  the  year  he  stood  at  Goshen, 
New  York.  Her  dam  was  a  great,  slashing  black  mare  called 
''Jin"  that  Mr.  Seely  had  used  in  his  business  many  years,  but 
her  origin  and  breeding  cannot  now  be  found.  She  must  have  been 
.a  real  good  one  or  Mr.  Seely  would  not  have  taken  her  to  Messen- 
ger. In  the  summer  of  1806,  as  was  his  custom,  he  was  down  at 
New  York  with  a  drove  of  cattle,  and  his  son  Jonas,  then  a  lad  of 


280  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

eight  or  ten  years  old,  went  along  to  help  drive  the  cattle  and 
to  see  the  city.  He  was  detained  two  or  three  days  longer  than  he 
expected  and  it  was  very  important  that  he  should  reach  home  at 
a  certain  time.  On  the  morning  of  that  day  he  found  himself 
in  Hobokeii,  with  his  son,  and  no  means  of  getting  home  except 
on  Silvertail.  So  he  took  the  boy  up  behind  him  and  went  home 
that  day,  seventy-five  miles,  by  sundown.  She  was  fully  sixteen 
hands  high  and  of  very  fine  style.  Her  head,  neck  and  ear  were 
bloodlike,  and  her  resolution  and  will  were  remarkable  even  in 
old  age.  Her  step,  at  the  trot,  is  not  known  to  have  been  much 
developed,  but  she  could  gallop  all  day  long.  On  several  occa- 
sions she  carried  her  master  to  Albany  in  a  day.  Besides  the 
famous  One  Eye  she  produced  several  superior  foals  that  brought 
high  prices,  in  those  days,  but  we  have  only  the  one  line  tracing 
to  her  as  a  producer.  She  died  the  property  of  Ebenezer  Seely. 
In  searching  for  the  particulars  of  this  pedigree  of  Hamble- 
tonian  and  in  tracing  it  back  to  old  ''Black  Jin,"  I  was  neces- 
sarily brought  into  contact  with  a  great  many  people,  some  of 
whom  were  helpful  and  some  were  not.  As  a  matter  of  course 
I  met  with  the  usual  number  who  professed  to  "know  it  all,"  but 
really  knew  nothing  that  was  reliable.  As  the  whole  tracing 
was  in  the  Seely  family,  the  public  may  wish  to  know  what  kind 
of  people  they  were.  Jonas  Seely,  first,  of  Oxford  in  Orange 
County,  was  a  large  farmer  in  the  last  century  and  an  extensive 
cattle  feeder  and  drover.  As  there  were  no  railroads  or  steam 
boats  in  those  days,  much  of  his  time  was  given  to  driving  cattle, 
either  in  collecting  them  from  the  interior  or  in  taking  them  to 
market  in  New  York.  He  had  use  for  good  horses  and  he  had  a. 
fancy  for  the  best.  His  business  brought  him  into  contact  with 
the  butchers  of  New  York,  and  we  find  he  sold  many  of  his  horses 
as  well  as  his  cattle  to  them.  These  same  business  relations  were 
continued  under  his  successor.  He  left  a  large  family  of  sons. 
who  seemed  to  take  to  the  horse  as  a  duck  takes  to  water. 
Jonas,  second,  was  one  of  his  younger  sons  and  succeeded  to  his 
father's  business  as  well  as  to  the  homestead.  He  was  born  1797 
at  Oxford,  and  his  father  removed  to  the  farm  at  Sugar  Loaf 
when  he  was  a  child.  He  was  a  thrifty  and  successful  farmer. 
For  a  number  of  years  he  was  engaged  with  his  partner  and  life- 
long friend,  Ebenezer  Pray,  in  buying  and  driving  cattle  from 
the  West  to  the  New  York  market.  In  June,  1882,  he  passed 
away  and  there  ended  an  acquaintance  and  a  friendship  of  nearly 


HAMBLETOXIAN    AND    HIS    FAMILY.  281 

thirty  years.  He  was  a  strictly  conscientious  and  truthful  man, 
:and  died  in  the  glorious  hope  of  a  devoted  Christian.  His  first 
yisit  to  New  York,  in  1806,  the  wonders  he  saw  there,  and  es- 
pecially the  total  eclipse  that  occurred  while  he  was  there,  and 
how  he  watched  it  from  the  Bull's  Head  tavern,  through  a  piece 
of  smoked  glass,  and  the  ride  home  the  next  day  behind  his 
father  on  Silvertail,  and  how  he  ran  down  many  a  hill  to  rest 
himself,  and  how  tired  he  was  when  they  reached  home,  are  inci- 
dents that  were  all  detailed  to  me  with  the  interest  and  vigor  of 
yesterday. 

When  One  Eye  was  about  fifteen  years  old  the  elder  Jonas  gave 
her  or  sold  her  to  his  son-in-law,  Josiah  Jackson,  and  in  due 
time  he  bred  her  to  imported  Bellfounder  and  she  produced  the 
Charles  Kent  mare.  Mr.  Rysdyk  thought  the  elder  Jonas  gave 
this  mare  to  his  son  Charles  and  that  Charles  sold  her  to  Mr. 
Jackson,  which  is  not  material.  After  the  Kent  mare  had  been 
battered  about  in  New  York  for  some  years  and  finally  crippled, 
Charles  Kent,  a  butcher,  bought  her  and  bred  her  to  Webber's 
Tom  Thumb,  a  Canadian  horse  that  was  quite  a  trotter.  On 
one  occasion  when  Jonas  II.  and  Mr.  Pray  were  down  in  the  city, 
Kent  wanted  to  sell  the  mare,  and  Mr.  Pray  urged  Jonas  very 
strongly  .to  buy  her  and  take  her  home  for  a  brood  mare.  He 
concluded  to  do  so  if  she  were  not  too  badly  crippled,  and  they 
together  went  over  on  to  the  island  to  see  her,  when  she  came 
again  into  the  Seely  family.  In  1848  he  bred  her  to  Abdallah, 
in  1849  she  produced  a  bay  colt,  and  in  the  autumn  of  that  year 
he  sold  her  with  her  colt  to  William  M.  Rysdyk,  who  had  been 
employed  on  his  farm  for  the  year,  for  one  hundred  and  twenty- 
five  dollars,  and  this  colt  proved  to  be  the  great  Hambletonian. 

As  it  is  now  conceded,  not  only  in  this  country,  but  through- 
out the  world,  that  Hambletonian,  as  a  trotting  progenitor,  is  far 
.and  away  the  greatest  horse  that  has  ever  been  produced,  a  care- 
ful and  true  analysis  of  the  blood  elements  entering  into  his  in- 
heritance is  a  most  interesting  and  instructive  lesson  for  all 
breeders.  First  we  have  the  direct  cross  from  Messenger  himself 
in  Silvertail;  second,  we  have  the  cross  from  a  son  of  Messenger 
on  a  daughter  of  Messenger  in  One  Eye,  making  her  equal  to  a 
daughter  of  Messenger  in  blood;  third,  we  have  the  out- 
cross  from  Bellfounder,  that  was  a  total  failure  as  a  trotting  pro- 
genitor, on  this  double  granddaughter  of  Messenger,  and  the  re- 
sult is  a  trotter  in  the  Kent,  mare  and  practically  the  only  trotter 


282  THE   HOKSE   OF   AMERICA. 

that  Bellfounder  ever  got;  fourth,  we  have  the  cross  of  a  grand- 
son and  probably  a  double  grandson  of  Messenger  on  this  trotter, 
and  the  produce  is  Hambletonian  himself.  These  crosses  show 
a  stronger  concentration  of  Messenger  blood  than  can  be  found 
in  any  horse  of  his  generation. 

BASHAW  (GREEN'S). — This  was  a  black  horse,  fifteen  and  a 
half  hands  high,  bred  by  Jonas  Seely,  the  breeder  of  Hamble- 
tonian; foaled  1855,  and  given  when  following  his  dam  to  his  son- 
in-law,  Colonel  F.  M.  Cummins,  of  Muscatine,  Iowa.  He  was  got 
by  Vernol's  Black  Hawk,  then  known  as  the  Drake  colt,  son  of 
Long  Island  Black  Hawk,  and  his  dam  was  Belle,  the  first  foal  of 
the  Charles  Kent  mare,  that  was  out  of  One  Eye.  In  the  spring^ 
of  1857  he  was  sold  to  Joseph  A.  Green,  of  Muscatine,  and  he  re- 
mained his  till  1864.  He  had  one  white  hind  foot  and  a  large, 
full  star  in  his  forehead.  He  was  a  smooth,  handsome  horse  in 
every  respect.  His  head,  neck,  ear  and  eye  were  all  good,  and 
free  from  coarseness.  His  back  and  loin  had  very  few  equals 
even  among  those  that  are  called  most  perfect  at  these  points. 
His  hip  was  of  great  length,  and  in  his  buttock  there  was  quite  a 
resemblance  on  a  reduced  scale  to  his  kinsman,  Hambletonian. 
His  limbs  and  feet  both  in  shape  and  quality  were  admirable,  and 
his  disposition  docile  and  kindly.  In  walking  his  gait  was  sling 
ing,  but  loose  jointed  and  slovenly,  and  he  was  therefore  not  a- 
pleasant  driving  horse.  But  at  the  trot,  whether  going  slow  or 
fast,  his  style  was  very  taking  and  his  action  remarkably  perfect. 
While  owned  by  Mr.  Green  he  was  handled  by  good,  careful  meny 
but  they  had  no  experience  in  developing  and  driving  a  trotter, 
and  knew  nothing  about  that  kind  of  horsemanship.  Under 
these  circumstances  many  a  horse  would  have  been  spoiled,  but 
his  gait  was  always  perfect  and  his  popularity  as  a  trotter  never 
waned.  He  never  was  started  in  what  might  be  called  regular 
races,  but  at  State  fairs  and  the  principal  county  fairs  he  was 
always  in  demand  and  always  won.  He  was,  perhaps,  the  best 
natural  trotter  that  I  have  ever  seen.  He  was  able  to  show  about 
2:28,  but  I  think  he  never  won  a  heat  on  a  half-mile  track  in 
better  than  2:31,  and  when  sixteen  years  old  he  was  able  to  win 
in  2:35.  In  1864  Mr.  Green  sold  him  to  some  parties  in  St. 
Louis,  Missouri,  and  they  to  Mr.  Beckwith  of  Hartford,  Con- 
necticut, and  while  in  his  hands  he  was  matched  against  Young 
Morrill,  but  went  amiss  and  paid  forfeit.  He  made  the  season  of 
1865  at  Hartford.  The  following  winter  Mr.  Green  repurchased 


HAMBLETONIAN    AND    HIS   FAMILY.  283 

him  and  he  was  returned  to  Muscatine,  where  he  remained  till 
January,  1877,  when  he  was  sold  to  George  A.  Young,  of  Leland, 
Illinois,  and  died  January,  1880. 

He  left  seventeen  trotters  in  the  2:30  list;  twenty-four  sons 
that  were  the  sires  of  fifty-nine  standard  performers,  and  thirty- 
four  daughters  that  produced  forty-four  standard  performers.  A& 
his  sire  never  amounted  to  anything  either  as  a  trotter  or  a  getter 
of  trotters,  it  is  fair  to  conclude  that  whatever  merit  he  possessed 
was  inherited  from  the  same  source  that  made  Hambletonian 
greater  than  all  others. 

BELLE,  the  dam  of  Bashaw,  50,  was  a  brown  mare  about 
fifteen  and  three-quarter  hands  high,  with  tan  muzzle  and  flanks 
and  some  white  feet.  She  was  rather  short  in  the  body  and 
neck,  but  she  was  very  stoutly  built  and  had  been  a  fine  road 
mare.  She  was  bred  by  Charles  Kent,  the  butcher,  and  I  think 
was  following  her  dam  when  Mr.  Jonas  Seely  bought  her.  She 
was  foaled  18-43  and  was  got  by  Tom  Thumb,  a  Canadian  horse, 
and  a  trotter  that  was  brought  into  Orange  County  by  William 
Webber  and  left  excellent  stock.  Her  dam  was  the  Charles  Kent 
mare,  the  dam  of  Hambletonian.  She  produced  as  follows: 

1848.  Bay  gelding,  by  Abdallab. 

1849.  Bay  filly  Seely  Abdallab,  by  Abdallab. 

1851.  Black  colt  Seely's  Black  Hawk,  by  Long  Island  Black  Hawk. 
1853.  Bay  filly,  (taken  West)  by  Hambletonian. 
1855.  Black  colt  Green's  Basbaw,  by  Vernol's  Black  Hawk. 
1857.  Bay  filly  by  Black  Hawk  Propbet,  son  of  Vermont  Black  Hawk,  in 
Iowa.     This  filly  v.  as  ringboned,  and  given  away. 

Nothing  is  now  known  of  the  gelding  by  Abdallah.  The  filly 
of  1849  by  Abdallah,  called  Seely  Abdallah,  was  owned  by  Mr. 
Charles  Backman,  and  he  had  her  produce  for  two  or  three 
generations. 

The  black  colt  by  Long  Island  Black  Hawk  of  1851  was  sold  to 
Ebenezer  Seely,  and  kept  as  a  stallion.  This  Mr.  Seely  died  in 
Chemung  County,  and  the  horse  died  there  in  the  spring  of  1859. 
The  filly  of  1853  by  Hambletonian  was  one  of  a  pair  of  Hamble- 
tonian fillies  bought  and  taken  to  Iowa  by  Mr.  Green  in  1855. 
They  developed  a  very  fine  rate  of  speed. 


CHAPTER   XXII. 

HAMBLETONIAN'S  SONS  AND  GRANDSONS. 

Different  opinions  as  to  relative  merits  of  Hambletonian's  greater  sons 
— George  Wilkes,  his  history  and  pedigree — His  performing  de- 
scendants— History  and  description  of  Electioneer — His  family — Alexander's 
Abdallah  and  his  two  greatest  sons,  Almont  and  Belmont — Dictator — 
Harold — Happy  Medium  and  his  dam — Jay  Gould — Strathmore — Egbert — 
Aberdeen — Masterlode — Sweepstakes  —  Governor  Sprague,  grandson  of 
Hambletonian. 

THERE  is  hardly  a  prominent  sire  by  Hambletonian  that  has 
not  been  claimed  by  his  admirers  to  have  been  the  "greatest  son" 
of  the  most  renowned  of  trotting  progenitors,  and  if  a  poll  of 
the  horsemen  of  the  country  could  be  taken  to-day  as  to  what 
horse  was  the  greatest  son  of  Hambletonian,  probably  a  dozen 
names  would  be  found  to  have  thousands  of  supporters  each.  As 
with  all  questions  that  are  largely  matters  of  opinion,  and  that 
oannot  be  decided  absolutely  by  figures,  the  relative  rank  of 
horses  as  progenitors  must  always  remain  open  to  disputation 
according  as  thinkers  approach  the  subject  from  different  points 
of  view  and  of  interest.  I  shall  not  enter  into  any  discussion  as  to 
the  relative  merits  of  the  great  sons  of  Hambletonian  with  a  purpose 
to  reach  any  deduction  as  to  which  was  or  is  the  greatest;  but 
shall  refer  the  reader  to  the  table  given  in  the  preceding  chapter, 
and  content  myself  with  briefly  giving  the  history  of  the  more 
renowned  sires  of  the  Hambletonian  line,  with  such  statistics  as 
may  be  necessary  to  gauge  their  rank  as  progenitors. 

GEORGE  WILKES  was  one  of  the  first  of  Hambletonian's  sons 
to  attract  attention,  by  his  performances  on  the  turf,  to  the 
value  of  his  sire;  and  as  a  progenitor  he  must  be  accorded  a  place 
in  the  first  rank  of  all  trotting  sires.  This  horse  was  bred  by 
Colonel  Harry  Felter,  Newburgh,  New  York,  was  foaled  1856, 
and  was  got  by  Hambletonian  out  of  the  fast  road  mare  Dolly 
Spanker.  (This  mare  was  afterward  registered  on  what  seemed 


HAMBLETON  JAN'S   SONS   AND   GRANDSONS.  285 

excellent  evidence  as  by  Henry  Clay,  out  of  a  daughter  of  Baker's 
Highlander,  but  more  recent  investigation  has  thrown  serious 
doubt  upon  this  pedigree,  the  subject  being  fully  discussed  in 
the  chapters  in  this  work  on  "The  Investigation  of  Pedigrees.") 
After  the  travail  that  brought  the  little  brown  colt  into  the 
world,  Dolly  Spanker  died,  and  the  orphaned  youngster,  like 
Andrew  Jackson,  owed  his  life  to  woman's  kindly  care.  He  was 
fed  by  the  women  of  the  farm  on  Jamaica  rum  and  milk  sweet- 
ened with  sugar,  and  soon  grew  lusty,  though  he  was  always  an 
undersized  horse,  never  much,  if  any,  exceeding  fifteen  hands  in 
height,  though  he  was  so  stoutly  and  compactly  made  that  he 
gave  the  impression  of  being  larger  than  he  really  was.  He  was 
of  that  order  that  has  been  paradoxically  described  as  "a  big 
little  horse."  In  color  he  was  a  very  dark  brown,  and  his  flanks 
and  muzzle  shaded  into  a  deep  tan,  or  wine  color.  From  a  de- 
tailed description  of  him  published  in  the  Spirit  of  the  Timea  in 
1862,  I  extract  the  following: 

"  He  is  about  15.1,  but  all  horse.  .  .  .  His  traveling  gear  is  just  what  it 
should  be — muscular  shoulders  long  strong  arms,  tiat  legs,  splendid  quarters, 
great  length  from  hip  to  hock,  and  very  fine  back  sinews.  He  stand  higher 
behind  than  he  does  forward,  a  formation  we  like.  .  .  .  He  is  very  wide 
between  the  jaws.  .  .  .  His  coat  is  fine  and  glows  like  the  rich  dark  tints 
of  polished  rosewood.  .  .  .  His  temper  is  kind.  We  had  the  pleasure  of 
seeing  him  at  his  work,  and  unless  we  are  greatly  mistaken  he  will  make  an 
amazingly  good  one.  He  has  a  long  and  easy  way  of  going,  striking  well  out 
behind  and  tucking  his  haunches  well  under  him." 

Though  from  the  fact  that  this  writer  stated  that  Wilkes  "was 
as  handsome  as  Ethan  Allen,"  we  might  suspect  him  of  a  tendency 
to  "paint  the  lily,"  it  will  be  noted  that  this  was  written  before 
the  horse  had  any  great  reputation  to  speak  of,  and  it  may  be 
accepted  as  a  substantially  correct  description  as  far  as  it  goes. 
In  describing  his  action  Charles  J.  Foster  wrote  that  "his  hind 
leg  when  straightened  out  in  action  as  he  went  at  his  best  pace  re- 
minded me  of  that  of  a  duck  swimming."  He  was  then  the  prop- 
erty of  Z.  E.  Simmons,  who  had  purchased  him  as  a  three-year- 
old  for  $3,000,  and  another  horse. 

George  Wilkes,  or  Robert  Fillingham,  as  he  was  first  named, 
was  a  trotter  from  colthood.  At  four  years  old  he  was  matched 
against  Guy  Miller,  but  his  party  paid  forfeit,  the  reason  there- 
for being  afterward  alleged  that  they  found  Fillingham  pos- 
sessed of  so  much  speed  that  they  decided  to  "lay  for  bigger 


286  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

game."  The  late  Alden  Goldsmith,  a  most  competent  judge,  saw 
the  colt  trot  at  this  time  and  then  thought  he  was  the  fastest 
horse  he  had  ever  seen.  He  won  a  race  in  August  of  his  five- 
year-old  year,  taking  a  record  of  2:33,  and  the  next  year  sprang 
into  wide  fame  by  defeating  the  then  popular  idol,  Ethan  Allen, 
in  straight  heats,  over  the  Union  Course,  the  fastest  heat  being 
in  2:24f.  In  October  of  that  year  he  started  in  harness  against 
General  Butler,  under  saddle.  Though  Butler  was  no  match  for 
George  Wilkes  in  harness,  with  a  saddle  on  his  back,  and  Dan 
Mace  in  the  saddle,  he  was  almost  unbeatable  in  his  day,  but  it 
took  him  four  heats  to  beat  Wilkes,  who  forced  him  out  in  the 
first  heat  in  2:21%,  a  record  he  never  after  surpassed.  Then 
William  L.  Simmons  and  John  Morrissey  matched  Wilkes  against 
Butler,  two~mile  heats  to  wagon,  the  latter  having  previously 
beaten  the  great  George  M.  Patchen  a  heat  in  record-breaking 
time  under  similar  conditions.  In  preparation  for  that  match 
George  Wilkes  was  sent  a  trial  over  the  Centerville  Course,  con- 
cerning which  there  has  been  much  discussion  and  probably 
much  romance.  Charles  J.  Foster  wrote  thus: 

"  It  was  a  close,  sultry  day  and  the  stallion  was  short  of  work.  ...  He 
•went  the  two-mile  trial  and  I  have  no  doubt  it  was  faster  than  trotter  ever  had 
before,  or  has  since,  in  any  rig.  But  it  '  cooked  his  mutton,'  as  the  saying  is, 
and  for  a  long  time  he  was  George  Wilkes  no  more." 

It  is  said  that  ever  after  this  trial,  whatever  it  may  have 
TDeen,  George  Wilkes  was  inclined  to  sulk  in  his  races.  He  raced 
with  fair  success  in  1863  and  1864,  and  at  the  beginning  of  1865 
was  classed  among  the  very  best  out.  He  was  sent  against  Dex- 
ter and  Lady  Thorn,  being  beaten  by  both;  but  in  1866  he  twice 
defeated  Lady  Thorn,  the  last  time  in  a  notable  wagon  race  over 
Union  Course  in  2:27,  2:2b,  2:26f .  Afterward  in  the  same  year  Lady 
Thorn  defeated  Wilkes  in  four  successive  races,  and  she  beat  him 
again  in  their  only  meeting  the  following  year,  but  in  1868  he 
defeated  the  mare  in  a  hard-fought  race,  she  winning  the  first 
and  second  heats  and  making  the  fourth  heat  dead.  George 
Wilkes  made  his  record  of  2:22,  October  13,  1868,  over  the  Nar~ 
ragansett  Course  at  Providence  in  a  winning  race  with  Rhode 
Island  and  Draco.  He  was  kept  on  the  turf  with  indifferent  suc- 
cess until  1872,  racing  frequently  against  Lucy,  Lady  Thorn, 
and  American  Girl,  all  of  whom  outclassed  him,  at  least  in 
the  afternoon  of  his  racing  career.  Just  how  fast  a  trotter 


HAMBLETOXIAN'S  soxs  AND  GKAXDSONS.  287 

George  Wilkes  was  it  is  impossible  definitely  to  determine, 
so  many  and  varying  have  been  the  representations  on  that 
point.  It  has  been  claimed  that  he  went  a  quarter  in 
twenty-nine  seconds  to  an  eighty-five  pound  wagon.  William  L. 
Simmons  some  years  ago  stated  that  of  his  own  knowledge 
George  Wilkes  trotted  a  mile  and  repeat  as  a  six-year-old  at  the 
Oenterville  Course  in  2:19^,  2:18^,  and  that  Sam  McLaughlin 
drove  him  a  half-mile  to  wagon  over  Union  Course  in  1 :04|. 
These  statements  I  give  for  what  may  be  deemed  their  worth, 
contenting  myself  with  the  remark  that  it  is  safe  to  conclude 
that  George  Wilkes  would  have  trotted  well  within  the  2:20  mark, 
if  he  had  been  managed  with  a  view  to  bringing  out  his  highest 
racing  capacity,  instead  of  being  handled  solely  for  the  purpose 
of  smart  betting  and  match-making  manipulations. 

George  Wilkes  was  taken  to  Lexington,  Kentucky,  by  William 
L.  Simmons,  his  owner,  in  1873,  and  in  his  declining  years  made 
a  reputation  so  great  in  the  stud  that  his  brilliant  turf  career  is 
almost  forgotten.  After  having  trotted  against  the  best  in  the 
country  for  twelve  successive  years,  proving  his  fitness  in  the 
fiery  ordeal  of  turf  contest,  he,  in  the  nine  remaining  years  of  his 
life,  fulfilled  the  purpose  of  his  being,  and  demonstrated  the 
truth  of  heredity  by  getting  trotters  in  plenty  able  to  do  and 
outdo  what  he  had  in  his  day  done. 

George  Wilkes  got  a  few  foals  before  going  to  Kentucky,  of 
which  the  most  notable  was  May  Bird,  2:21,  the  first  trotter  to 
"bring  him  reputation  as  a  sire.  Of  the  others  got  in  the  North, 
Young  Wilkes,  2:28^,  a  sire  of  some  reputation,  and  Wilkes 
Spirit,  who  also  figures  in  the  table  of  sires,  are  the  only  ones  to 
earn  places  in  the  records.  Early  in  the  eighties  George  Wilkes 
"began  to  assume  high  rank  as  a  sire,  May  Bird,  Kentucky  Wilkes, 
Prospect  Maid,  So  So,  Joe  Bunker  and  others  bringing  him  into 
prominence.  Every  year  added  to  his  roll  of  honor  and  soon  he 
was  among  the  leaders.  Blue  Bull  had  surpassed  Hambletonian 
in  the  number  of  trotters  to  his  credit  in  the  2:30  list,  but  at  the 
close  of  1886  George  Wilkes  was  even  with  the  Indiana  sire,  in 
1887  he  passed  him,  and  for  some  seasons  led  all  sires  of  2:30 
performers.  George  Wilkes  got  seventy-two  trotters  and  eleven 
pacers  to  acquire  standard  records,  of  which  the  most  noted  were 
Harry  Wilkes,  2:13£,  Guy  Wilkes,  2:15i,  and  Wilson,  2:16£;  and 
ninety-four  of  his  sons  and  eighty-one  of  his  daughters  have 
produced,  as  shown  in  the  table  of  Hambletonian's  sons,  1801 


288 


THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 


standard  performers.  The  following  table  embraces  the  sons; 
of  George  Wilkes  that  have  twenty  or  more  standard  performers 
to  their  credit: 


LEADING   SONS   OP   GEORGE   WILKES. 


Name. 

i 
1 
i 

tn 

Standard 
performers. 

Producing  sons. 

Producing 
daughters. 

Standard  perform- 
ers produced  by 
sons  and  daugh- 
ters. 

Total  No.  produced 
in  two  genera- 
tions. 

Red  Wilkes   2-40 

1874 

19,7 

69 

41 

267 

394 

Onward,  2'25£     

1875 

190 

64 

82 

275 

395 

Alcantara,  2:23  

1876 

98 

99 

15 

115 

213 

1  875 

67 

14 

19, 

45 

112 

Si.  unions    2-28         

1879 

64 

13 

6 

35 

99 

Wilton,  2:19i  

1  880 

61 

3 

4 

8 

69 

Jay  Bird   2'31f              .  . 

1878 

57 

10 

10 

68 

125 

Alcvone  2:27     

1877 

55 

97 

9 

117 

172 

Guy  Wilkes,  2:15^  

1879 

59 

10 

5 

49 

101 

Ambassado1    2-21J     .   . 

1  875 

48 

8 

3 

33 

81 

Gambetta  Wilkes,  2:26  

188) 

48 

11 

6 

32 

80' 

Baron  WTilkes,  2:18  

1S89 

47 

6 

7 

18 

65 

1878 

38 

6 

7 

25 

63 

Wilkes  Boy   2'24|     .  .           

1880 

37 

2 

3 

8 

45 

Young  Jim       

1874 

37 

11 

19 

43 

80' 

Brown  Wilkes,  2;21£  

1876 

39 

5 

1 

39 

71 

Young  Wilkes   2-28£ 

1868 

29 

6 

3 

12 

41 

Favorite  Wilkes   2:24^ 

1877 

93 

7 

6 

21 

44 

Woodford  WTilkes  

1889 

93 

1 

4 

12 

35 

Wilkie  Collins 

1876 

21 

5 

1 

10 

31 

Lumps    2'21             .  .            ....          . 

1875 

90 

3 

10 

16 

36 

The  King   2'29£  

1874 

90 

20 

Jersey  \Vilkes 

1881 

20 

2 

2 

22 

" 

Among  the  other  seventy-one  producing  sons  of  George  Wilkes: 
that  do  not  come  within  the  scope  of  this  table  are  many  most 
promising  sires  of  rapidly  growing  prominence,  and  indeed  this 
family  is  branching  out  wonderfully  in  every  direction.  This 
family  is  an  emphatically  improving  one.  In  extreme  speed,  in 
racing  capacity,  and  in  form  the  third  Wilkes  generation  is  better 
than  either  the  second  or  first.  Of  trotters,  such  as  Beuzetta, 
2:06f,  Ralph  Wilkes,  2:06f,  Hulda,  2:08|,  Allerton,  2:09£,  the 
once  sensational  Axtell,  2:12,  and  many  others  of  the  first  rank 
by  sons  of  George  Wilkes  sustain  this  judgment.  The  pacing 
instinct  is  rampant  in  the  Wilkes  blood,  as  is  attested  by  the  fact 
that  twenty-five  per  cent,  of  the  performing  get  of  George  Wilkes" 


HAMBLETONIAN'S   SONS   AND   GRANDSONS.  289 

sons  are  pacers,  and  frequently  pacers  of  extreme  speed,  includ- 
ing such  as  Joe  Patchen,  2:03,  and  Rubenstein,  2:05,  while  John 
E.  Gentry,  2:00|,  Online,  2:04,  and  Frank  Agan,  2:03,  are  by  grand- 
sons of  Wilkes.  Like  his  sire,  George  Wilkes  got  many  sons 
greater  than  himself — and  after  all  that  is  the  true  test  of  great- 
ness in  a  progenitor. 

ELECTIONEER  has  for  some  years  led,  far  and  away,  all  sires 
of  trotters  in  the  numbers  of  performers  to  his  credit  in  both 
the  2:20  list  and  2:30  list,  and  is  generally  conceded  to  have  had 
no  equal  as  a  producer  of  early  speed — that  is,  of  colts  and  fillies 
that  trotted  fast  at  tender  ages.  In  many  respects  this  was  the 
most  remarkable  horse  of  any  age,  for  besides  being  phenomenally 
prolific  in  transmitting  speed  at  the  trot,  and  in  getting  early 
trotters,  he  possessed  in  a  higher  degree  than  any  sire  that  has 
yet  lived  the  ability  to  control  running  blood  in  the  dam,  and  to 
impress  his  own  instinct  and  action  upon  his  progeny  out  of  any 
and  all  kinds  of  mares.  In  speaking  on  his  pet  hobby  of  produc- 
ing trotters  from  thoroughbred  running  mares,  Governor  Stan- 
ford once  said  to  me:  "None  of  my  stallions  but  Electioneer  can 
do  it;"  and  of  all  the  hundreds  of  stallions  that  have  been  mated 
with  thoroughbred  mares  in  the  hope  of  getting  a  trotter  of  ex- 
treme speed,  Electioneer  alone  was  able  to  do  it.  Palo  Alto, 
2:08^,  is  so  far  faster  than  any  other  trotting  horse  out  of  a  thor- 
oughbred dam — the  one  solitary  instance  on  record  of  a  half-bred 
trotter  of  extreme  speed — that  he  is  significant  in  one  way,  and 
one  only,  and  that  is  as  an  evidence  of  the  phenomenal  pre- 
potency of  the  blood  of  his  sire  in  controlling  instinct  and  action. 

Electioneer  was  a  dark  bay  horse,  foaled  May  2,  1868,  bred  by 
Charles  Backman,  at  his  Stonyford  Stud,  Orange  County,  New 
York.  He  was  got  by  Hambletonian,  out  of  Green  Mountain 
Maid,  by  Harry  Clay,  2:29,  grandam  the  fast  trotting  mare 
Shanghai  Mary,  pedigree  not  established,  but  in  all  probability  a 
daughter  of  Iron's  Cadmus,  the  sire  of  the  famous  old  pacer  and 
brood  mare  Pocahontas,  2:17£.  (In  Chapter  XXIX.,  on  the 
investigation  of  pedigrees,  the  history  of  Shanghai  Mary  is  fully 
given.)  Green  Mountain  Maid,  the  dam  of  Electioneer,  has  been 
called  by  Mr.  Backman,  and  with  justice/ 'the  great  mother  of  trot- 
ters." In  all  she  bore  sixteen  foals,  fourteen  of  which  were  by 
the  not  remarkable  horse  Messenger  Duroc.  Electioneer  was 
her  second  foal  and  the  only  one  by  Hambletonian.  Of  the  other 
fifteen,  nine  have  records  of  2:30  and  better,  another  has  a  record 


290  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

of  2:31,  another,  Paul,  was  a  very  fast  road  horse,  and  two  died 
young.  Of  her  four  sons  kept  entire,  Electioneer,  Mansfield, 
Antonio,  and  Lancelot,  all  are  sires  of  trotters,  and  her  daughters 
already  figure  as  producers.  The  figures  would  seem  to  point  to 
the  daughter  of  Shanghai  Mary  and  Harry  Clay,  2:29,  as  perhaps 
the  most  wonderful  of  all  great  trotting  brood  mares.  She  was  a 
brown  mare,  barely  fifteen  hands  high,  with  a  star  and  white  hind 
ankles,  and  was  finely  formed,  with  an  exceptionally  beautifully 
outlined  and  expressive  head.  She  had  very  superior  trotting 
action,  the  trot  being  her  fastest  natural  gait.  A  writer  who 
made  a  very  close  study  of  her  history  said,  on  this  point,  in  Wal- 
lace's Monthly: 

"  Her  education  was  limited  to  a  single  lesson  when  three  years  old;  but 
previously  she  had  been  regularly  developed  on  somewhat  the  same  plan  since 
adopted  for  early  training  at  Palo  Alto,  and  was  probably  one  of  the  fastest 
trotters  out  of  harness  that  ever  lived." 

As  a  matter  of  fact  Green  Mountain  Maid,  while  in  no  sense 
vicious,  was  so  highly  strung,  wild  and  uncontrollable,  that  her 
training  was  abandoned  with  the  "one  lesson"  referred  to,  and 
she  never  wore  harness  again. 

Green  Mountain  Maid  was  a  money  producer  as  well  as  a 
speed  producer.  Mr.  Backman  paid  four  hundred  and  fifty 
dollars  for  her  when  she  was  carrying  her  first  foal,  and  the 
writer  above  quoted  states  that  up  to  that  date  (1889)  Mr. 
Backman  had  received  sixty-eight  thousand  eight  hundred 
and  thirty  dollars  for  such  of  her  progeny  as  he  had  then 
sold.  This  remarkable  mare  died  June  6,  1888,  and  a  fit- 
ting monument  marks  her  grave  by  the  banks  of  the  Walkill. 

At  maturity  Electioneer  was  of  that  shade  of  bay  that  many 
might  call  brown,  and  stood  precisely  fifteen  and  one-half  hands 
at  the  wither  and  an  inch  higher  measured  at  the  quarter.  Many 
of  his  get,  notably  Sunol,  are  pronouncedly  higher  behind  than 
at  the  wither.  In  general  conformation,  Electioneer  was  a  stout 
and  muscular  horse,  standing  on  fairly  short  legs.  His  head  was 
well  proportioned,  of  fair  size,  and  a  model  of  intelligent  beauty. 
The  forehead  was  broad  and  brainy,  the  eyes  large  and  softly 
expressive,  and  the  profile  regular,  with  just  the  faintest  sugges- 
tion of  concavity  beneath  the  line  of  the  eyes.  Electioneer's 
neck  was  a  trifle  too  short  for  elegance  of  proportion,  but 
not  gross.  His  shoulder  was  good,  the  barrel  round,  of  good 


HAMBLETOXIAN'S  SONS  AND  GRANDSONS.  291 

depth  and  proportionate  in  length  and  well  ribbed,  and  the 
coupling  simply  faultless.  The  quarters  were  marvelous,  and 
Mr.  Marvin  did  not  overstate  the  case  when  he  said  they  were 
the  best  he  had  ever  seen  on  any  stallion.  They  were  the  very 
incarnation  of  driving  power,  and  recalled  Herbert  Kittredge's 
portrait  of  Hambletonian,  except  that  there  was  nothing  gross 
or  meaty  about  the  buttocks  of  Electioneer.  They  were  the  per- 
fection of  muscular  endowment  and  development.  The  arms 
and  gaskins,  like  the  quarters,  were  full  with  muscle  laid  on 
muscle,  and  the  legs  and  feet  were  naturally  excellent.  In  the 
last  years  of  his  life  he  went  over  on  his  knees  a  bit,  but  that  was 
not  strange  considering  his  age,  and  the  fact  that  he  had  seen 
considerable  track  work.  Indeed  as  long  as  he  was  at  all  vigor- 
ous he  was  daily  exercised  on  the  track,  and  in  view  of  his  great 
success  in  the  stud,  this  fact  has  a  special  significance. 

As  a  three-year-old  Electioneer  was  worked  some  on  the  Stony- 
ford  farm  track  to  wagon,  and  Mr.  Backman,  whose  word  is  good 
enough  authority  for  all  who  know  him,  stated  that  he  showed  a 
quarter  to  wagon  in  thirty-nine  seconds  in  that  year.  Little 
else  is  known  of  his  history  at  Stonyford.  He  was  bred  to  a  few, 
very  few  mares,  and  was  evidently  not  greatly  esteemed  by  Mr. 
Backman.  In  the  autumn  of  1876,  ex-Governor  Stanford,  who 
was  just  establishing  his  great  breeding  farm,  Palo  Alto,  in  the 
Santa  Clara  Valley,  California,  visited  Stonyford  to  purchase 
stock — principally  brood  mares.  The  governor  was  a  great  be- 
liever in  what  I  may  call  horse-physiognomy,  or  to  be  more  exact, 
he  believed  in  the  importance  of  the  right  psychical  organization, 
what  we  commonly  call  brain  force,  in  horses,  and  was  attracted 
by  the  physical  evidences  thereof  as  indicated  in  the  head.  Elec- 
tioneer pleased  him  in  this  regard,  and  in  his  general  make-up, 
and  when  the  governor's  purchase  was  completed  Electioneer 
went  along,  being  put  in  at  twelve  thousand  five  hundred  dollars. 
He  with  the  other  Stonyford  purchases  arrived  at  Palo  Alto 
Christmas  Eve,  1876. 

Though  Electioneer  never  took  a  record,  he  was  emphatically 
a  developed  horse.  I  do  not  know  whether  he  was  ever  driven  a 
full  mile  or  not— Mr.  Marvin  never  drove  him  one — but  it  has 
been  stated  that  one  of  the  other  trainers  drove  him  a  mile  in 
time  somewhere  between  2:20  and  2:26.  However  they  may  be, 
Mr.  Marvin  in  his  book  settles  the  question  as  to  his  having  been 
a  fast,  trained  trotter.  He  says: 


292  THE    HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

"  Electioneer  is  the  most  natural  trotter  I  have  ever  seen.  He  has  free, 
abundant  action;  it  is  a  perfect  rolling  action  both  in  front  and  behind,  and  he 
has  not  the  usual  fault  of  the  Hambletonians  of  going  too  wide  behind.  Certain 
writers  have  said  that  Electioneer  could  not  trot,  and  have  cited  him  as  a 
stallion  that  was  not  a  trotter  yet  got  trotters.  ...  I  have  driven,  beside 
Electioneer,  aquarter  in  thirty-fiveseconds.  .  .  .  Hedidthis,  too,  hitched  to  a 
one  hundred  and  twenty-five-pound  wagon,  with  a  two  hundred  and  twenty- 
pound  man,  and  not  a  professional  driver,  either,  in  the  seat.  In  this  rig  he 
could  carry  Occident  right  up  to  his  clip,  and  could  always  keep  right  with 
him;  and  it  was  no  trick  for  the  famous  St.  Clair  gelding  to  go  a  quarter 
in  thirty-four  seconds.  Without  preparation  you  could  take  Electioneer 
out  any  day  and  drive  him  an  eighth  of  a  mile  at,  a  2:20  gait.  He 
always  had  his  speed  with  him.  .  .  .  That  Electioneer  could  have  beaten 
2:20  if  given  a  regular  preparation  is  with  me  a  conviction  about  which  no 
doubt  exists." 

Mr.  Marvin  is  a  conservative  and  reliable  man;  he  knew 
whereof  he  wrote,  and  his  testimony  must  be  accepted  as  conclu- 
sive both  as  to  Electioneers  having  been  a  naturally  fast  trotter, 
and  as  to  his  having  had  his  speed  developed.  Undeveloped 
horses  do  not  trot  quarters  in  thirty-five  seconds. 

When  in  1880  Fred  Crocker,  one  of  the  seven  foals  got  by 
Electioneer  in  his  first  year's  service  in  California,  astonished 
the  world  by  trotting  to  a  two-year-old  record  of  2:25f,  his  sire 
became  instantly  famous,  and  that  fame  has  increased  rapidly  and 
steadily  from  that  day  to  this.  It  was  not  allowed  for  a  moment 
to  wane  or  lag.  After  Fred  Crocker  came  an  ever-surprising 
procession  of  young  record  breakers.  In  1881  Hinda  Rose  made 
a  yearling  record  of  2:36|,  and  Wildflower  a  two-year-old  record 
of  2:21.  In  1883  Hinda  Eose  lowered  the  three-year-old  record 
to  2:19^  and  Bonita  the  four-year-old  record  to  2:18f.  In  1886 
Manzanita  lowered  the  four-year-old  record  to  2:16;  in  1887 
Norlaine,  granddaughter  of  Electioneer,  lowered  the  yearling 
record  to  2:31^;  and  in  1888  Sunol  put  the  two-year-old  record 
at  2:18,  and  the  year  following  took  a  three-year-old  record  of 
2:10^,  the  fastest  to  that  date.  Sunol  captured  the  four-year-old 
record  in  1889,  and  the  world's  record,  2:08^,  in  1891,  but  what 
made  this  the  brightest  year  in  all  the  history  of  Palo  Alto  was 
that  Arion  lowered  the  two-year-old  record  to  2:10| — the  most 
remarkable  of  all  trotting  performances — Bell  Bird  the  yearling 
record  to  2:26£,  and  Palo  Alto  the  stallion  record  to  2:08|.  Elec- 
tioneer has  now  to  his  credit  one  hundred  and  fifty-four 
standard  performers,  and  in  this  and  in  the  2:20  list  he  has 
a  long  lead  over  all  other  sires.  He  died  at  Palo  Alto,  December 


HAMBLETONIAN'S  SONS  AND  GRANDSONS. 


293 


3,  1890,  and  I  am  informed  that  his  skeleton  has  been  articulated 
and  mounted  for  the  museum  of  the  Stanford  University.  The 
following  table  gives  the  sons  of  Electioneer  that  up  to  the  close 
of  1896  had  ten  or  more  standard  performers  to  their  credit: 


LEADING   SONS   OF   ELECTIONEER. 


Name. 

| 

1 

i 

&M 

Standard 
performers. 

Producing  sons. 

Producing 
daughters. 

Standard  perform- 
ers produced  by 
sons  and  daugh- 
ters. 

T3   J. 

is 

^g 

£  &o 

a. 
i** 

Saint  Bell   2-24| 

1889 

47 

1 

1 

48 

Sphinx    2:2(H               

1883 

43 

43 

Chimes,  2:30£  

1884 

39 

3 

3 

35 

Anteeo   2'16£                                      ... 

1879 

98 

5 

3 

12 

40 

Xorval    2:l4f  

1889 

94 

1 

1 

25 

Egotist,  2:22|  

1885 

18 

1 

1 

19 

Anteros 

1889 

16 

9 

2 

18 

Elector  (2170),  2-31  

1879 

16 

16 

Albert  W.,  2:20  
Eros  2-29^     

1878 
1879 

15 
14 

1 
3 

.... 

1 

4 

16 

18 

Antevolo,  2:19|  

1881 

13 

1 

1 

14 

*Bell  Bov   2-19J. 

1885 

11 

1 

1 

12 

Fallis   2-23       

1878 

10 

1 

3 

13 

Palo  Alto,  2:08f  

1889 

10 

10 

*  Died  at  5  years  old. 

In  considering  this  table  it  is  necessary  to  remember  that  the 
Electioneer  family  dates  from  1878,  and  that  no  family  of  any- 
thing approaching  so  late  a  date  makes  a  showing  that  will  bear 
comparison  with  this.  In  considering  the  rank  of  families 
this  question  of  age  is  always  vital.  Electioneer^  first  crop  of 
foals  at  Palo  Alto — 1878 — numbered  seven,  and  of  these  two 
are  represented  above,  while  another  was  the  famous  gelding 
Ered  Crocker.  The  next  numbered  but  twenty-one,  and  of 
these  Eros,  Elector,  and  Anteeo  are  in  the  table,  and  ten  are 
in  the  2:20  list.  His  third  and  fourth  crops  (1880  and  1881) 
numbered  sixteen  and  twenty-three  respectively,  and  the  forty  of 
1882  was  the  greatest  number  he  ever  got  in  one  year.  I  am  in- 
formed that  in  all  Electioneer  got  less  than  four  hundred  foals  at 
Palo  Alto;  and  that,  since  the  first  one  saw  light  in  1878  this 
family  should  in  eighteen  years  make  the  showing  it  has  with 
nearly  fifty  per  cent,  of  its  members  in  the  2:30  list,  and  four  hun- 


294  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

dred  and  ninety-three  of  the  second  generation  also  there,  is  cer- 
tainly remarkable.  Electioneer  has  to  his  credit  in  the  2:15  list 
the  following  trotters:  Arion,  2:07f,  Sunol,2:08i,  Palo  Alto,  2:081, 
Helena,  2:12|,  Belleflower,  2:12f,  Utility,  2:13,  Quality,  2:13i, 
Conductor,  2:14^,  and  Norval,  2:14f,  an  "extreme  speed  list  "' 
greater  than  to  the  credit  of  any  other  sire,  while  among  the  get 
of  his  sons  are  such  trotters  as  Azote,  2:04f,  Fantasy,  2:06, 
Little  Albert,  2:10,  Lynne  Bel,  2:10£,  Copeland,  2:1H,  Athanio, 
2:1  If,  Cobwebs,  2:12,  etc.,  etc.  Sixty-five  of  his  sons  have  sired 
four  hundred  and  thirty-seven  performers,  and  forty-three  of  his 
daughters  have  produced  fifty-six  performers.  With  all  these 
facts  kept  in  view  the  study  of  the  above  table  will  prove  interest- 
ing and  instructive  in  forming  an  estimate  of  the  merit  of  Elec- 
tioneer as  a  trotting  progenitor. 

ALEXANDER'S  ABDALLAH  was  the  founder  of  one  of  the 
very  greatest  of  the  Hambletonian  sub-families,  and  he  stands  in 
the  records  as  a  progenitor  of  the  first  rank.  This  was  a  stout 
bay  horse,  about  fifteen  and  one-half  hands  high.  Excepting  a 
right  white  ankle  he  was  a  rich  solid  bay.  The  only  reliable 
portrait  in  existence  of  this  horse  was  a  drawing  by  Herbert 
Kittredge,  made  from  a  photograph  taken  of  Abdallah  after  he 
went  to  Kentucky.  The  picture  of  Abdallah  published  in  this  work 
is  u  faithful  reproduction  of  the  Kittredge  portrait  published  in 
Wallace's  Monthly  for  March,  1881,  and  in  the  absence  of  any 
reliable  detailed  description  of  the  horse  this  portrait  must  be 
taken  as  the  best  reflection  we  now  have  of  his  individuality. 
He  was  bred  by  Lewis  J.  Sutton,  of  Warwick,  Orange  County, 
Xew  York,  and  was  foaled  1852.  Mr.  Sutton  had  in  1851  a 
good  road  mare  that  he  had  got  at  Carl  Young's  roadhouse  in 
Third  Avenue,  New  York.  This  mare,  Katy  Darling,  had  been 
quite  a  trotter,  and  had,  it  was  said,  won  a  match  race  on  Union 
Course.  Her  reputation  as  a  trotter  and  her  fine  form  caused 
Mr.  Sutton  to  buy  her  when,  as  he  describes  it,  "she  was  stand- 
ing on  three  legs,"  in  the  hope  of  getting  a  foal  from  her.  He 
took  her  home  in  March,  1851,  and  in  August  bred  her  to 
Rysdyk's  Hambletonian,  then  a  two-year-old  colt,  and  Septem- 
ber 22,  1852,  she  produced  the  subject  of  this  sketch.  Two  years 
later  Mr.  Sutton  sold  Katy  Darling  to  James  W.  Benedict,  of 
Warwick,  from  whom  she  was  purchased  by  Hezekiah  Hoyt,  who 
took  her  to  Muscatine,  Iowa,  where  she  produced  a  chestnut  colt 
that  was  gelded,  by  Hector,  son  of  La  Tourrett's  Bellfounder. 


HAMBLETONIAN'S  SONS  AND  GRANDSONS.  295 

This  gelding  was  her  only  foal  other  than  Alexander's  Abdallah, 
and  Katy  Darling  died  at  Muscatine,  the  property  of  a  Mr. 
Stewart.  A  search  was  long  kept  up  for  the  pedigree  of  this 
mare,  and  for  the  full  details  of  what  is  known  of  her  history  the 
reader  is  referred  to  the  different  volumes  of  Wallace's  Monthly. 
The  conclusion  from  all  the  evidence  found  is  that  she  was  prob- 
ably by  a  son  of  Andrew  Jackson. 

As  a  foal  by  his  dam's  side  Alexander's  Abdallah  attracted 
much  favorable  attention  by  his  fine  trotting  action,  and  his  per- 
sistency in  cavorting  around  at  that  gait.  Among  those  who 
took  great  delight  in  watching  the  little  fellow  trot  was  Mr. 
Hezekiah  Hoyt,  and  when  the  youngster  was  seventeen  months 
old  Mr.  Hoyt,  acting  for,  or  in  partnership  with,  Major  Edsall, 
bought  the  colt  for  five  hundred  dollars,  a  fine  price  at  that  time. 
Major  Edsall  kept  him  until  he  was  seven  years  old,  and  I  am 
under  the  impression  that  he  won  some  local  races  during  that 
time,  when  he  was  known  as  EdsalFs  Hambletonian.  He  was 
accorded  a  fairly  liberal  patronage  in  Orange  County,  and  his 
progeny  showed  so  well  that  Major  Edsail  sold  him  for  three 
thousand  dollars  in  1859  to  Joel  F.  Love  and  James  Miller,  of 
Cynthiana,  Kentucky.  The  Hambletonian  family  was  just  then 
becoming  popular,  and  the  price  paid  indicates  that  this  horse 
was  already  regarded  by  good  judges  as  one  of  Hambletonian 's 
best  sons.  That  he  was  regarded,  moreover,  as  quite  a  trotter  is 
indicated  by  the  fact  that  at  the  close  of  his  second  season  in 
Kentucky — 1860 — Mr.  Miller  matched  him  against  Albion,  a 
competing  stallion,  for  two  hundred  and  fifty  dollars  a  side.  The 
affair  caused  quite  a  sensation  at  the  time,  the  Cynthiana  horsemen 
going  in  crowds  to  Lexington  to  back  Abdallah.  The  latter  was 
driven  by  "Jim"  Monroe,  and  Albion  by  Warren  Peabody,  and 
Abdallah  won  in  the  hollowest  fashion,  distancing  Albion  in  2:46. 
As  youngsters  Abdallah's  first  progeny  in  Kentucky  showed  very 
well,  and  in  the  spring  of  1863  he  was  purchased  by  R.  A. 
Alexander,  and  made  the  seasons  of  1863  and  1864  at  Woodburn. 
On  the  evening  of  February  2,  1865,  Marion's  band  of  Confed- 
erate guerrillas  raided  Woodburn  and  took  away  a  number  of 
horses,  among  them  Alexander's  Abdallah  and  the  then  famous 
young  trotter,  Bay  Chief,  by  Mambrino  Chief.  Marion  mounted 
Bay  Chief  and,  crossing  the  Kentucky  River,  the  band  encamped 
on  the  farm  of  a  Mr.  Bush,  in  a  rough,  hilly  region,  twelve  miles 
from  Woodburn.  Here  the  next  morning  the  Federal  cavalry, 


296  THE   HOUSE   OF   AMERICA. 

that  were  sent  in  pursuit  after  the  raid,  came  up  with  the  raiders, 
and  after  a  sharp  fight  routed  them.  Marion,  on  Bay  Chief,  was 
a  conspicuous  mark  for  Federal  bullets  during  the  skirmish. 
Early  in  the  fray  Bay  Chief  was  shot  through  the  muzzle, 
through  both  thighs,  and  one  hock.  In  this  condition  he  carried 
his  rider  two  miles  in  the  retreat,  when  the  horse  was  so  weak- 
ened by  loss  of  blood  that  a  Federal  cavalryman  overtook  them. 
His  piece  being  empty,  the  soldier  aimed  a  blow  at  Marion,  but 
missing  him,  lost  his  balance,  and  fell  from  his  horse.  The 
guerrilla  leader  quickly  saw  his  opportunity,  jumped  from  Bay 
Chief,  mounted  the  soldier's  horse,  and  escaped.  Bay  Chief 
died  about  ten  days  later,  despite  all  efforts  made  to  save  him. 
Meanwhile,  Alexander's  Abdallah  had  been  found,  safe  and 
sound,  by  a  Federal  soldier  in  Mr.  Bush's  stable.  The  soldier 
refused  to  give  him  up  to  Mr.  Alexander's  men,  and  declared 
he  would  send  him  North  and  keep  him  until  he  got  a  large  re- 
ward for  his  return.  The  horse  was  barefooted  and  in  no  condi- 
tion for  hard  usage.  And  so  they  rode  him  oif,  and  after  going 
some  forty  or  fifty  miles  he  gave  out,  and  they  turned  him  loose 
on  the  road.  He  was  found  next  day  in  a  pitiable  condition  by 
the  roadside,  and  brought  back  as  far  as  Lawrenceburg  on  his  way 
home,  where  he  was  taken  with  pneumonia  and  died  a  few  days 
later. 

Just  how  great  a  loss  this  was  to  the  trotting  breed  was  not 
realized  until  long  after — until  in  fact  Goldsmith  Maid  had  con- 
quered all  before  her,  and  made  a  record  as  a  campaigner  never 
equaled,  and  until  his  two  great  sons,  Almont  and  B^elmont, 
rose  to  pre-eminent  places  in  the  list  of  great  sires.  Other  sons 
of  this  remarkable  progenitor  have  taken  rank  as  sires,  and  his 
daughters  proved  of  the  highest  excellence  as  brood  mares;  but 
Almont  and  Belmont  have  each  established  such  large,  impor- 
tant, and  popular  sub-families  that  this  work  would  be  incomplete 
without  some  brief  sketch  of  each. 

Alexander's  Abdallah  got  Goldsmith  Maid,  2:14,  Rosalind, 2 :21|, 
Thorndale,  2:22i,  Major  Edsall,  2:29,  and  St.  Elmo,  2:30.  Four- 
teen of  his  sons  have  produced  one  hundred  and  fifty-five  stand- 
ard performers,  and  twenty-nine  of  his  daughters  have  produced 
forty-four  standard  performers,  among  them  being  the  noted 
campaigners,  Favonia,  2:15,  and  Jerome  Eddy,  2:16f,  the  latter 
also  a  successful  sire.  The  following  table  gives  the  families  of 
his  most  prominent  sons: 


HAMBLETONIAN'S  SONS  AND  GRANDSONS.  297 

LEADING    SONS  OP   ALEXANDER'S   ABDALLAH. 


E 

0> 

ao 

£3 

co 
E 

0  T3    3 

3    | 

'O 

0 

i 

'bt 

!& 

Name. 

•| 

O) 

T?S 

C 

.I'-S  i?  1  1 

C    fe 

£ 

T3 

otf   ^ 
T3 

O 

s 

a^s  rf 

5-  a 

I 

1 

a 

eS 

1 

1 

j2  M  c  ^ 

G    t-    O    ^) 

l.s-S 

02 

PU 

02 

H 

Almont   2'39f 

1864 

1884 

37 

95 

72 

609 

646 

Belinont         

1864 

1889 

58 

63 

48 

560 

618 

1858 
1859 

1885 

24 
8 

12 
6 

13 
3 

49 

87 

73 

90 

Major  Edsall  2:29  

Tborndale,  2:22i  

1865  1894 

10 

8 

14 

47 

57 

Jim  Munro                          . 

1861  1882 

3 

5 

17 

38 

46 

Abdallah  Pilot  

1865 

1881 

3 

1 

1 

17 

20 

ALMONT  was  bred  at  Woodburn  Farm,  was  foaled  1864,  and  was 
by  Alexander's  Abdallah  out  of  Sally  Anderson,  by  Mambrino 
Chief;  grandam  Kate,  a  wonderfully  fast  pacer  by  Pilot  Jr. 
Colonel  R.  P.  Pepper  informed  me  that  he  knew  Kate  as  well  as 
any  of  his  own  horses,  and  that  her  speed  at  the  pace  was  "sim- 
ply terrific."  Kate,  whose  dam  was  called  the  Pope  mare,  pedi- 
gree unknown,  had  several  foals,  among  them  the  "catch  filly" 
that  was  the  dam  of  Clay  Pilot,  sire  of  The  Moor,  that  got  the 
great  brood  mare  Beautiful  Bells,  2:29-J,  and  Sultan,  2:24,  the  sire 
of  the  world-famous  Stamboul,  2:07|.  Thus  the  blood  of  this 
pacing  Pilot  Jr.  mare  figures  in  three  great  sub-families,  the 
Almont  family,  the  Beautiful  Bells  family,  and  the  Sultan  family. 
Almont  was  a  beautiful  cherry  bay,  very  rich  in  shade,  and  with- 
out any  white  whatever.  He  was  fifteen  hands  two  and  one- 
(jiutrter  inches  high  at  the  wither,  somewhat  higher  behind,  and 
stoutly  and  symmetrically  made  all  over.  He  could  not  be  called 
a  handsome  or  highly  finished  horse,  but  he  was  emphatically  a 
well-made  one.  He  had  very  excellent  feet  and  legs,  and  these 
he  reproduced  with  great  uniformity,  as  well  as  his  very  intelli- 
gent and  even  disposition.  He  was  trained  early  at  Woodburn, 
and,  like  his  sire,  started  but  once  and  distanced  his  competitor 
in  2:39f,  this  being  in  his  four-year-old  form.  He  soon  after 
showed  2:32  over  the  slow  Woodburn  track,  and  was  sold  to  the 
late  Colonel  Richard  West  for  eight  thousand  dollars  and  put  in 
the  stud.  In  1874  the  late  General  W.  T.  Withers,  Lexington, 
Kentucky,  bought  him  for  fifteen  thousand  dollars,  and  a  half 


298  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

dozen  of  years  later  lie  was  very  generally  regarded  as  the  greatest 
of  living  sires,  and  his  prestige  made  the  name  of  Fairlawn  Farm 
of  world-wide  renown,  and  made  his  owner  rich.  The  fact  that 
ninety-five  of  his  sons  have  sired  standard  performers,  a  greater 
number  of  producing  sons  than  is  to  the  credit  of  any  other 
horse,  Hambletonian  alone  excepted,  indicates  the  high  rank 
Almont  must  be  accorded  as  a  progenitor.  In  considering  his 
success  it  is  well  for  breeders  particularly  to  note  that  good 
judges  considered  Almont  capable  of  showing  a  2:20  gait  any 
day,  and  that,  like  Electioneer,  he  always  was  daily  given  regu- 
lar and  ample  track  exercise.  His  gait  has  been  described  as  bold 
and  open,  without  an  excess  of  knee  action,  but  with  immense 
display  of  power  behind.  Almont  died  of  spasmodic  colic,  July  4, 
1884,  in  the  fullness  of  his  fame,  and  at  an  age  when,  had  he  been 
more  discreetly  used  in  the  stud,  he  should  have  been  at  his 
prime  as  a  stock  horse. 

Almont  was  hardly  a  sensational  horse  in  his  day,  the  perform- 
ance of  Westmont  at  Chicago  in  1884,  when  he  paced  a  mile  with 
running  mate  in  2:01f,  being  the  one  sensational  performance  to 
the  credit  of  his  progeny.  This  lightning  streak  of  pacing  speed 
that  so  often  crops  out  in  the  Almont  family  can  be  readily 
accounted  for  by  the  student  of  breeding.  As  has  been  noted,  his 
grandam  Kate,  by  Pilot  Jr.,  was  a  phenomenally  fast  pacer,  and, 
as  we  have  indicated,  her  blood  proved  potent  in  more  than  one 
line.  In  addition  to  this  there  was  a  strong  tendency  to  pace 
among  the  progeny  of  Alexander's  Abdallah.  St.  Elmo  was  first 
shown  at  fairs  in  Kentucky  under  saddle  and  as  a  pacer,  and 
many  others  of  Abdallah's  get  were  known  to  naturally  pace. 
When  we  reflect  that  in  Almont  this  Alexander's  Abdallah  blood 
with  its  pacing  predilection  was  united  with  the  blood  of  the  old 
lightning  pacer,  Kate,  we  need  not  be  surprised  at  the  great 
number  of  fast  pacers  that  came  from  Almont  and  his  sons. 
Belmont,  too,  has  shown  a  tendency  to  get  the  pacing  gait  with 
great  frequency,  but  not  in  such  frequency  or  at  such  high  rates 
as  his  son  Nutwood.  As  there  could  not  be  traced  any  known 
pacing  blood  in  Belmont's  dam,  and  as  the  fact  that  Alexander's 
Abdallah  transmitted  an  inclination  to  pace  has  been  generally 
not  known  or  ignored,  some  writers  have  been  unable  to  under- 
stand why  the  Belmonts  paced.  He  got  pacers  because  he  in- 
herited that  capacity  from  his  sire,  and  Nutwood  got  more  and 
faster  pacers  than  Belmont,  because  in  him  the  pacing  inclina- 


HAMBLETONIAN'S  SONS  AND  GRANDSONS. 


299 


tion  inherited  from  Alexander's  Abdallah  was  reinforced  by  the 
strong  pacing  inheritance  of  his  dam,  Miss  Russell,  the  grand- 
daughter of  Old  Pacing  Pilot. 

As  shown  in  the  table  of  Alexander's  Abdallah's  sons,  Almont 
got  thirty-seven  standard  performers,  ninety-five  of  his  sons  sired 
five  hundred  and  three  standard  performers,  and  seventy-two  of 
his  daughters  produced  one  hundred  and  six  standard  performers. 
His  most  successful  sons  are  embraced  in  the  following  table: 


LEADING   SONS   OP   ALMONT. 


Name. 

•8 
I 

1 

Standard 
performers. 

Producing  sons. 

Producing 
daughters. 

(Standard  perform- 
ers produced  by 
sons  and  daugh- 
ters. 

Performers  pro- 
duced in  two 
generations. 

Almont  Jr   (1829)  2'26  

187?. 

44 

7 

?,0 

b9 

83 

Altamont    2'26£     

1875 

39 

7 

1 

10 

49 

Atlantic   2-21                                 

1878 

94 

6 

1?. 

22 

46 

Piedmont   2'17J             

1871 

19 

3 

8 

18 

37 

Almont  Jr   (1764)   2:29  

1871 

19 

11 

11 

51 

70 

Kino-  \lmont   2'21£ 

1874 

14 

1 

1 

15 

Pasacas   2  '43                     

1870 

14 

4 

6 

13 

27 

Almonarch   2'24£     ..   

1875 

13 

?, 

3 

7 

20 

Allie  Gaines     

1875 

1?, 

5 

8 

17 

29 

1879 

10 

1 

g 

3 

13 

*  \llie  West  2'25  

1870 

7 

4 

10 

24 

31 

1870 

13 

1 

11 

24 

37 

*  Died  at  6  years  old. 

This  line  is  justly  regarded  with  growing  favor  as  one  of  our 
very  best  and  most  productive  sub-families,  and  one  that  is 
breeding  on  excellently,  generation  after  generation. 

BELMONT  was  a  bay  horse  of  very  superior  form  and  finish, 
bred  at  Woodburn  Farm,  and  foaled  there  in  1864.  He  was  by 
Alexander's  Abdallah,  out  of  Belle  (that  also  produced  McCurdy's 
Hambletonian,  2:26^,  andBicara,  the  dam  of  Pancoast,  2:21f.)  by 
Mambrino  Chief;  gran  dam  Belle  Lupe,  by  Brown's  Bellfounder. 
Belmont  and  Almont  were  of  the  same  age,  and,  perhaps  because 
of  his  finer  appearance,  Belmont  seems  to  have  been  the  preferred 
one  at  Woodburn,  and  was  retained  while  Almont  was  sold. 
Though  Belmont  was  a  successful  horse  and  established  a  great 


300 


THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 


family,  no  thinking  man  can  contend  that  he  was  the  equal  of 
Almont  as  a  sire,  when  all  the  circumstances  are  considered. 
Almont  spent  almost  his  entire  stud  career  at  Fairlawn,  where 
there  never  were  five  mares  worthy  in  blood  to  be  in  a  great  trot- 
ting stud,  where  there  were  scores  of  mares  of  all  kinds  of  poor 
and  freakish  pedigrees,  even  to  " Arabs, "  and  where  none  of  the 
stock  was  ever  trained.  Belmont,  on  the  other  hand,  was  all  his 
life  at  the  head  of  the  most  famous,  and,  in  his  younger  years, 
unquestionably  the  best  collection  of  trotting  brood  mares  in  the 
world,  and  where  a  training  department  was  always  maintained. 
Eemembering  these  conditions,  and  contemplating  the  statistics 
of  the  two  families,  it  is  interesting  to  speculate  as  to  how  the 
records  would  stand  had  Belmont  been  at  Fairlawn,  and  Almont 
at  Woodburn. 

LEADING  SONS  OP  BELMONT. 


.  e 

03 

| 

a£-g 

8| 

s 

3 

^ 

I'Bi 

02 

TJ 

0 

S 

be 

^     0  r£j 

oa  a  0 

Name. 

03 
1 

be 

- 

*3 

|l 

HI 

,—!      .    ci 

IH 

-o 

T3 

S 
T3 

Isll 

111 

» 

3 

2 

2 

eg   O>   02  -2 

g-O   be 

^ 

02 

£4 

CLt 

02 

PH 

Nutwood   2-18f 

1870 

136 

90 

69 

432 

568 

Kino-  Rene   2'30£            

1875 

35 

17 

16 

55 

90 

E^iuont                   

1878 

34 

13 

11 

38 

72 

Wedge  wood  ,  2:19  

1871 

31 

12 

9 

60 

91 

Vat  can    2'29^                                

1879 

14 

14 

Warlock                  .        

1880 

12 

12 

Monaco             

1H78 

11 

1 

4 

7 

18 

\Vaterloo   2*194- 

1889, 

10 

1 

1 

11 

Meander  2'26£     .        .  .            

1879 

10 

3 

1 

7 

17 

Mambritonian    2:20|   

1883 

10 

10 

Herscliell 

1S83 

10 

10 

Belmont,  besides  having  the  advantage  of  excellent  individual- 
ity was  also  a  trotter  of  no  mean  speed.  He  was  driven  a  mile 
over  the  working  track  at  Woodburn  in  2:28^,  and  was,  there- 
fore, a  quite  well-developed  trotter.  He  never  appeared  in 
public,  and  has,  therefore,  no  public  history.  The  most  success- 
ful of  his  sons  has  been  Nutwood,  whose  dam  was  Miss  Russell, 
the  dam  of  Maud  S.  This  horse  was  himself  a  fast  trotter  in  his 
day,  taking  a  record  of  2:18f,  and  rose  to  great  popularity  and 
success  in  the  stud.  Daughters  of  Belmont,  being  nearly  all  out 


301 

of  producing  mares,  are  greatly  and  justly  esteemed  as  brood 
mares.  Belmont  died  at  Woodburn  November  15,  1889.  Bel- 
mont  got  fifty-eight  standard  performers,  sixty-three  of  his  sons 
sired  four  hundred  and  eighty-nine  standard  performers,  and 
forty-eight  of  his  daughters  produced  seventy-one  standard  per- 
formers. The  rank  of  his  best  sons  is  shown  on  the  preceding 
page;  all  having  ten  or  more  in  the  list  of  standard  performers 
being  included  in  the  table. 

VOLUNTEER  stands  pre-eminent  among  trotting  sires  as  the 
one  horse  against  not  one  of  whose  get  the  epithet  "quitter" 
was,  as  far  as  I  am  aware,  ever  hurled.  He  did  not  get  speed 
with  remarkable  uniformity,  nor  did  his  progeny  develop  speed 
early  or  rapidly.  They  required  persistent  training,  but  when 
speed  was  developed  in  a  Volunteer  you  had  with  it  every  other 
quality  of  a  resolute,  enduring  race  horse.  They  were  hardy, 
rugged,  good-limbed  horses,  and  uniformly  possessed  stamina 
and  resolution  in  the  highest  degree.  Volunteer  had  the  advan- 
tage of  being  owned  by  Alden  Goldsmith,  an  ambitious  and 
experienced  horseman,  and  the  father  of  two  of  the  most  success- 
ful trainers  of  our  day.  The  Volunteers  had,  therefore,  every 
advantage  that  training  could  give,  and  his  rise  to  fame  was 
largely  due  to  Mr.  Goldsmith's  constantly  developing  and  racing 
his  progeny. 

In  1853  Mr.  Joseph  Hetzel,  Florida,  Orange  County,  New 
York,  bred  the  bay  mare  Lady  Patriot  to  Hambletonian,  10,  and 
Volunteer  was  foaled  May  1,  1854.  This  mare,  Lady  Patriot, 
was  by  a  horse  called  Young  Patriot,  and  out  of  Mr.  Lewis 
Hulse's  trotting  mare,  and  that  is  all  that  is  known  of  her  pedi- 
gree. Her  sire's  pedigree  is  wholly  unknown.  She  produced  a 
numerous  family,  among  them  being  Sentinel,  2:29f,  and  Green's 
Hambletonian,  brothers  of  Volunteer,  and  of  some  rank  as  sires, 
and  Marksman,  by  Thorndale,  that  is  also  in  the  table  of  sires, 
while  her  daughter  Heroine,  sister  to  Volunteer,  produced 
Shawmut,  2:26. 

Volunteer  was  a  bay  horse,  with  a  little  white  around  the  left 
hind  coronet,  fifteen  hands  three  inches  at  the  wither,  and  six- 
teen hands  measured  at  the  coupling.  He  has  been  considered 
by  many  good  judges  to  have  been  the  handsomest  of  all  the  sons 
of  Hambletonian.  He  was  a  horse  of  superb  form  and  of  great 
elegance  of  carriage.  With  sufficient  of  muscle  and  substance, 
he  was  built  on  graceful,  finished  lines,  with  a  beautiful  head 


302  THE    HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

loftily  carried,  a  long  and  graceful  neck,  a  body  stout  but  finely 
molded,  and  all  set  off  by  a  handsome  mane  and  tail.  His  feet  and 
legs  were  of  superb  quality,  and  despite  his  great  age  they  were, 
it  is  said,  without  fault  or  blemish  to  the  last.  His  temper  and 
disposition  were  good,  though  he  was  very  high-spirited,  and  in 
harness  he  was  especially  attractive.  As  a  four-year-old  Volun- 
teer was  sold  to  Mr.  E.  C.  Underbill,  of  Brooklyn,  after  he  had 
won  a  premium  at  the  Orange  County  fair.  In  April,  1861, 
Mr.  Underbill  sent  him  to  Tim  T.  Jackson,  of  Jamaica,  Long 
Island,  and  in  Wallace^ s  Monthly  for  December,  1880,  Mr.  Jackson 
gave  his  experiences  with  Volunteer,  making  among  others  this 
specific  statement: 

"  I  bad  him  at  Union  Course  one  day,  and  met  Mr.  Alfred  M.  Tredwell 
there,  and  I  got  him  to  hold  that  watch  on  him.  Had  him  in  quite  a  heavy 
single-seated  wagon,  weighing  probably  one  hundred  and  twenty-five  or  one 
hundred  and  thirty  pounds.  On  the  first  trial  he  trotted  in  2:38.  I  said  to 
Mr.  Tredwell  that  he  could  beat  that,  and  he  trotted  the  next  mile  in  2:31^." 

He  had  previously  been  trained  by  William  Whelan,  at 
Union  Course.  It  was  June  26,  1862,  while  he  was  in  Jackson's 
hands,  that  Alden  Goldsmith,  in  partnership  with  Edwin 
Thome,  purchased  this  horse,  then  called  Hambletonian  Jr., 
and  he  soon  afterward  became  the  sole  property  of  Mr.  Gold- 
smith. Mr.  Kysdyk  greatly  resented  his  having  been  called 
Hambletonian  Jr.,  and  early  regarded  him  as  a  possible  rival 
of  Hambletonian,  and  there  was  war  from  the  start  between 
the  adherents  of  sire  and  son.  The  Civil  War  was  just  then  at 
its  height,  and  the  patriotic  and  military  spirit  rampant,  and  Mr. 
Goldsmith  aptly  named  his  horse  Volunteer.  Mr.  H.  T.  Helm, 
who  wrote  a  very  detailed  history  of  Volunteer  twenty  years  ago, 
credits  him  with  having  trotted  in  2:36  to  wagon  at  the  Goshen 
Fair  in  the  fall  of  1862,  beating  Winfield,  Grey  Confidence  and 
others.  At  Hartford,  Connecticut,  in  August,  1867,  he  beat 
George  M.  Patchen  Jr.,  in  a  single  dash  in  2:37.  He  was,  like 
nearly  all  the  other  great  sires,  a  developed  trotter. 

It  is  said  that  his  early  stud  opportunities  were  so  limited  that 
at  ten  years  old  he  had  but  eighteen  living  foals.  The  first  of 
his  get  entered  the  2:30  list  in  1871,  but  from  that  time  on  his 
list  rapidly  grew,  and  the  great  campaigners  Gloster,  Alley, 
Driver,  Bodine,  Huntress,  the  great  three-miler,  and  finally  St. 
Julien,  2:lli,  then  the  fastest  trotter  in  the  world,  so  spread  the 


HAMBLETONIAN'S  so^s  AND  GRANDSONS.  303 

fame  of  Volunteer  that  when  his  sire  died  in  1876  he  was  re- 
garded as  the  greatest  living  sire  of  trotters.  In  1882  Mr.  R.  S. 
Veech,  probably  the  most  intelligent  breeder  in  all  Kentucky, 
while  on  a  visit  to  New  York,  telegraphed  Mr.  Goldsmith  to 
know  whether  it  was  worth  while  for  him  to  visit  Walnut  Grove, 
with  a  view  to  buying  Volunteer,  and  Mr.  Goldsmith's  answer 
reveals  the  regard  in  which  he  held  his  horse.  The  pith  of  his 
admirably  written  letter  was  in  this  paragraph: 

"  While  there  is  no  person  that  would  be  more  welcome  at  the  farm  than 
yourself,  if  the  only  object  of  your  visit  would  be  the  purchase  of  Volunteer, 
then  your  trip  would  not  be  a  profitable  or  successful  one,  as  no  breeder  in 
Kentucky  has  money  enough  to  buy  him.  ...  I  have  as  high  a  regard 
for  money  as  the  most  of  men  for  the  uses  it  may  subserve,  but  there  are  cer- 
tain things  which  money  cannot  buy,  as  the  Teacher  of  old  taught  Simon  the 
Samaritan." 

And  so  Volunteer  remained  at  Walnut  Grove,  and  "lagged 
superfluous  on  the  stage"  long  after  his  owner  had  passed  away, 
and  died  December  13,  1888,  at  the  extraordinary  age  of  thirty- 
four  years,  seven  months  and  twelve  days. 

Volunteer  sired  thirty-four  standard  performers,  and  forty  of 
his  sons  and  forty-eight  of  his  daughters  produced  an  aggregate 
of  two  hundred  and  twenty-one  standard  performers.  The  most 
successful  of  his  sons  is  the  Michigan  sire,  Louis  Napoleon,  that 
was  out  of  the  Harry  Clay  mare,  Hattie  Wood,  dam  also  of  Victor 
Bismarck  and  Gazelle,  2:21.  Louis  Napoleon  has  twenty-seven 
in  the  standard  list,  and  fourteen  of  his  sons  and  twenty-two  of 
his  daughters  are  producers,  his  best  son  being  Jerome  Eddy, 
2:16i,  sire  of  Fanny  Wilcox,  2:10J,  and  twenty-seven  other  stand- 
ard performers. 

DICTATOR  very  early  in  his  career  attracted  attention  as  the 
full  brother  to  the  famous  Dexter,  who  was  his  senior  by  five 
years,  and  who  was  king  of  the  trotting  turf,  and  the  most 
famous  trotter  in  all  the  world  just  at  the  time  when  Dictator 
was  merging  from  colthood  to  maturity.  Dictator  had  thus  from 
the  very  start  the  advantage  of  splendid  stud  opportunities.  He 
was  bred  by  Jonathan  Hawkins,  of  Walden,  Orange  County,  New 
York,  and  was  foaled  in  1863.  He  was  got  by  Hambletonian  out 
of  the  famous  Clara,  the  dam  of  Dexter,  2:17^,  Alma,  2:28f, 
Astoria,  2:29^,  etc.,  by  Seely's  American  Star;  grandam  the  Mc- 
Kinstry  mare,  breeding  unknown,  but  that  produced  Shark  with 


304  THE   HOUSE    OF   AMERICA. 

a  saddle  record  of  2:27f.  Dictator  was  a  seal-brown  horse  with 
a  white  rear  ankle,  and  stood  scant  fifteen  hands  and  one  inch. 
He  was  made  on  a  small  but  a  fine  model,  and  was,  all  in  all,  a 
handsome  little  horse,  and  most  of  his  get  partook  of  his  fine 
quality  of  structure,  though  many  were  unsound.  Shortly  after 
Dexter  made  his  debut  on  the  turf,  Dictator  was  bought  by  Mr. 
Harrison  Durkee,  a  wealthy  New  York  gentleman  who  had  an 
extensive  stock  farm  at  Flushing,  Long  Island.  The  colt  was 
then  but  eleven  months  old  and  was  left  at  the  Hawkins  farm 
until  two  years  old.  Then  he  was  sent  to  Mr.  Alden  Goldsmith's 
place,  at  Washingtonville,  to  be  broken,  after  which  he  was  taken 
to  Mr.  Durkee's  farm.  The  colt  was  very  fast,  but  the  fame  of 
Dexter  was  already  wide,  and,  no  great  importance  being  at- 
tached to  development  of  stallions  in  that  day,  he  was  considered 
of  more  value  for  breeding  than  for  racing.  He  was  worked 
considerably  at  Mr.  Durkee's  farm,  and  Colonel  John  W.  Conley 
and  H.  0.  Woodnut,  who  at  different  times  had  charge  of  him, 
have  both  declared  that  they  knew  him  to  be  one  of  the  fastest 
trotters  of  his  day.  In  1874  Colonel  Richard  West  sold  Almont 
to  General  Withers,  and  to  fill  his  place  leased  Dictator  in  the 
autumn  of  1875,  and  he  made  the  seasons  of  1876  and  1877  at 
Colonel  West's  Edgehill  farm,  Georgetown,  Kentucky.  Stand- 
ing at  a  higher  fee  than  Almont  or  George  Wilkes,  he  attracted 
little  outside  patronage,  and  he  was  returned  to  Long  Island.  It 
has  been  stated  that  when  at  Colonel  West's,  George  Brasfield 
drove  Dictator  quarters  as  fast  as  thirty-four  and  one-half 
seconds.  After  his  return  to  Flushing  he  sank  from  public 
notice  until  the  appearance  of  Director  as  a  great  three-year-old 
in  1880.  Then  a  couple  of  years  later  came  the  phenomenal 
Jay-Eye-See,  and  close  after  him  Phallas,  and  with  these  three 
great  trotters  on  the  turf  at  once  "the  sire  of  Jay-Eye-See,  2:10, 
Phallas,  2:13f,  and  Director,  2:17,"  came  again  prominently  before 
the  public.  In  1883  he  was  purchased  by  Major  II.  C.  McDowell, 
and  Messrs.  David  Bonner  and  A.  A.  Bonner,  for  a  price  that 
was  said  to  have  been  twenty-five  thousand  dollars,  and  taken  to 
Ashland  farm  at  Lexington.  Eventually  he  became  the  sole 
property  of  Major  McDowell,  and  died  May  25,  1893. 

Dictator  did  not  get  speed  uniformly.  He  was  what  might  be 
called  a  sporadic  sire,  but  those  of  his  get  that  raced  at  all  raced 
well.  By  far  his  best  son  as  a  producer  is  Director,  2:17,  that 
was  out  of  Dolly  by  Mambrino  Chief,  and  is  the  sire  of  sixteen 


HAMBLETONIAN'S  SONS  AND  GRANDSONS.  305 

trotters  and  pacers  with  records  in  the  2:20  list,  including  the 
champion  trotting  stallion  Directum,  2:05£,  and  the  one-time 
champion  pacing  stallion,  Direct,  who  after  being  practically 
crippled  in  trotting  to  a  four-year-old  record  of  2:18£,  carrying 
great  weights  to  keep  him  at  that  gait,  was  allowed  to  go  at  his 
natural  gait  and  paced  in  2:05£,  and  is  already  a  very  successful 
sire.  Phallas,  2:13f,  of  whom  high  hopes  were  entertained,  and 
who  had  great  opportunities,  proved  practically  a  failure  in  the 
stud,  though  his  son  Phallamont,  out  of  an  Almont  mare,  ranks 
with  Direct  as  the  best  of  Dictator's  grandsons.  Dictator  got  fifty 
standard  performers,  forty-four  of  bis  sons  have  produced  one 
hundred  and  seventy-three  standard  performers,  and  forty-two  of 
his  daughters  have  produced  sixty-one  standard  performers. 

HAROLD  became  very  famous  when  Maud  S.  became  queen  of 
fhe  turf  with  the  then  marvelous  record  of  2:08f,  a  record  that 
stood  unequaled  from  1885  till  1891.  This  horse  was  bred  by 
Charles  S.  Dole,  Crystal  Lake,  Illinois,  by  whom  he  was  sold,  in 
an  exchange  of  horses,  to  Woodburn  Farm,  when  he  was  a  year- 
ling. He  was  foaled  in  1864,  and  his  dam  was  Enchantress 
(the  dam  also  of  Black  Maria  and  of  Lakeland  Abdallah),  by 
Abdallah.  It  was  long  claimed  that  this  mare's  dam  was  a 
daughter  of  imported  Bellfounder,  but  investigation  exploded 
this  claim.  Harold  was  a  bay  horse,  without  marks,  just  fifteen 
hands  high,  stoutly  made  but  very  homely  of  form.  He  had  a 
finely  made  head,  but  otherwise  he  was  exceedingly  plain,  and 
when  Maud  S.  came  out  the  late  Benjamin  Bruce,  in  the  Ken- 
tucky Live  Stock  Record,  expressed  wonder  that  "that  little 
bench-legged  stud"  could  have  gotten  such  a  mare.  Harold's 
full  brother,  Lakeland  Abdallah,  was  far  superior  to  him  in- 
dividually, but  ranks  with  Hetzel's  Hambletonian,  the  brother 
to  Volunteer,  and  Kearsarge,  by  Volunteer  out  of  Dexter's  dams, 
in  the  fore  front  of  the  well-bred  failures  in  trotting  history. 
Largely  from  his  individuality  Harold  was  never,  even  when 
Maud  S.  was  in  the  heyday  of  her  renown,  a  popular  horse,  and 
the  figures  given  by  the  Woodburn  management  say  that  in  his 
entire  career  he  was  bred  to  but  five  hundred  and  ninety-four 
mares,  or  an  average  of  about  twenty-five  for  each  of  his  twenty- 
three  seasons.  With  the  exception  of  Maud  S.,  Harold  got 
nothing  of  the  first  class,  but  in  the  second  generation  the  family 
holds  better  rank  in  respect  to  extreme  speed  production.  Beu  - 
zetta,  2:06f,  Early  Bird,  2:10,  The  Conqueror,  2:13,  and  the  great 


306  THE   HOUSE    OF    AMERICA. 

three-year-old  Impetuous,  2:13,  are  out  of  daughters  of  Harold, 
while  Kremlin,  2:07f,  Io,  2:13£,  Eizpah,  2:13^,  Bussellmont,  2:12|, 
and  the  great  pacer  Robert  J.,  2:01-|,  are  among  the  produce  of 
his  sons,  and  the  present  queen  of  the  trotting  turf,  Alix,  2:03f, 
is  out  of  a  daughter  of  Attorney,  by  Harold.  Harold  died  at 
Woodburn,  October  6,  1893.  This  horse  never  trotted  in  public, 
but  he  was  worked  some  for  speed  at  Woodburn.  As  a  six-year- 
old  he  is  said  to  have  trotted  the  farm  track  in  2:40^,  in  which 
mile  it  is  stated  he  '  'grabbed  a  quarter"  and  was  not  worked 
again.  He  is  the  sire  of  forty-four  standard  performers,  forty- 
three  of  his  sons  have  produced  one  hundred  and  eighty-one 
standard  performers,  and  forty- five  of  his  daughters  have  pro- 
duced sixty-seven  standard  performers. 

HAPPY  MEDIUM  was  bred  by  R.  F.  Galloway,  of  Sufferen,  New 
York,  and  was  foaled  1863.  He  was  by  Hambletonian,  out  of 
the  famous  old  campaigner  Princess,  2:30,  that  trotted  ten  miles 
in  29:10f  and  two  miles  in  5:02,  and  was  the  great  rival  of  Flora 
Temple,  2:19f .  Princess  was  a  bay  mare,  foaled  1846,  by  Andrus' 
Hambletonian,  son  of  Judson's  Hambletonian,  that  was  by 
Bishop's  Hambletonian,  son  of  imported  Messenger;  and  her 
dam  was  the  Wilcox  mare,  by  Burdick's  Engineer,  son  of  Engi- 
neer, by  imported  Messenger.  She  campaigned  from  ocean  to 
ocean,  and  her  career  is  perhaps  the  most  remarkable  of  the 
earlier  trotting  days.  When  young  she  was  mixed  gaited,  alter- 
nately pacing  and  trotting,  and  was  put  to  work  hauling  logs. 
Then  her  owner  traded  her  for  a  second-hand  wagon,  and  finally 
she  reached  the  hands  of  D.  M.  Gage,  of  Chicago.  He  put  her 
into  training,  and  she  trotted  some  indifferent  races  as  Topsy, 
was  sold,  and  taken  across  the  plains  to  California.  Here  in 
1858  she  beat  New  York,  taking  her  record  of  2:30.  Then  she  fell 
into  the  hands  of  the  notorious  "Jim"  Eoif,  and  the  next  year 
was  matched  against  the  then  crack  trotter  of  California,  Glencoe 
Chief,  at  ten  miles  to  wagon.  These  were  golden  days  on  the 
coast,  and  this  race  was  for  the  enormous  stake  of  thirty-six  thou- 
sand five  hundred  dollars.  Princess  won  easily  in  29:10f,  but  the 
Glencoe  Chief  party  being  dissatisfied,  another  race  was  trotted 
the  next  day  at  the  same  distance  for  five  thousand  dollars, 
Princess  again  winning.  There  was  after  this  nothing  on  the 
coast  to  race  with  Princess,  and  Eoff  brought  her  to  New  York 
to  try  conclusions  with  Flora  Temple.  Her  first  race  with  Flora 
was  at  three-mile  heats  at  Eclipse  Course,  Long  Island,  Flora 


SOXS   AND   GKANDSONS.  307 

winning,  but  at  two-mile  heats  a  week  later  Princess  won  in  5:02, 
5:05.  In  their  subsequent  races  Flora  turned  the  tables,  though 
in  a  stubborn  contest  at  two-mile  heats  Princess  forced  the  then 
queen  of  the  turf  to  make  the  long  unbeaten  record  of  4:50£. 
She  was  then  retired  from  the  turf,  and  after  passing  through 
several  hands  became  the  property  of  R.  F.  Galloway,  who  in 
1862  bred  her  to  Hambletonian. 

Happy  Medium  was  a  bay  horse,  with  star,  snip,  and  two  white 
rear  ankles,  fifteen  hands  two  inches  in  height,  and  was  a  shapely, 
attractive  horse,  with  excellent  legs  and  feet.  Some  critics  have 
found  fault  that  he  was  light  barreled,  and  perhaps  with  some  de- 
gree of  reason,  but  as  a  whole  he  was  structurally  much  above  the 
average  of  his  time.  As  a  four-year-old  he  started  at  the  Goshen 
Fair  and  won,  taking  a  record  of  2:54,  which  he  lowered  to  2:51  in 
1868.  The  next  year,  1869,  at  Paterson,  New  Jersey,  he  distanced 
Guy  Miller  and  Honesty  in  2 :34£,  2 :32|,  and  these  three  perform- 
ances, all  winning  ones,  comprise  his  entire  turf  career.  He  was 
in  1871  purchased  at  a  very  large  price — said  to  have  been  twenty- 
five  thousand  dollars — by  Mr.  Robert  Steel,  who  placed  him  at 
the  head  of  his  Cedar  Park  Farm,  at  Philadelphia.  In  1879  he 
was  purchased  by  the  late  General  W.  T.  Withers,  and  taken  to 
his  Fairlawn  Farm,  Lexington,  Kentucky,  where  he  remained 
until  he  died,  January  25,  1888,  at  which  time  he  had  more  2:30 
performers  to  his  credit  than  any  horse  then  living.  The  Happy 
Mediums  developed  speed  easily  and  quickly,  and  were  remark- 
able for  the  purity  of  their  gait.  The  most  famous  of  his  get  is 
the  mare  Nancy  Hanks,  that  lowered  the  world's  record  to  2:04 
in  1892.  The  mares  bred  to  Happy  Medium  never  were  as  a 
whole  of  good  breeding,  and  in  his  early  stud  career  they  were 
largely  of  inferior  blood  and  quality.  His  fame  has  steadily 
grown,  and  with  ninety-two  standard  performers  to  his  credit, 
and  his  sons  and  daughters  breeding  on,  the  blood  of  Happy 
Medium  is  justly  held  in  very  high  esteem  as  a  positive  speed- 
producing  element.  Fifty-one  of  his  sons  have  produced  two 
hundred  and  thirteen,  and  forty-seven  of  his  daughters  have 
produced  fifty-nine  standard  performers. 

JAY  GOULD  was  one  of  the  most  famous  of  all  the  sons  of  Ham- 
bletonian on  the  turf  and  the  sensational  trotting  stallion  of  his 
day,  and  he  now,  in  turn,  takes  a  high  place  among  producing  sons 
of  the  great  father  of  trotters.  This  horse  was  bred  by  the  late 
Richard  Sears,  of  Orange  County,  New  York,  was  foaled  1864, 


•308  THE   HOESE   OF   AMEKICA. 

-and  was  got  by  Hambletonian,  out  of  Lady  Sanford,  by  Seely's 
American  Star;  grandam  Old  Sorrel,   by  Exton  Eclipse;  third 
dam  by  Lawrence's  Messenger  Duroc,   etc.     At   maturity   Jay 
Gould  was  a  handsome,   blood-like  horse,  fifteen   and   one-half 
hands  high,  and  a  rich  bay  in  color,  with  white  hind  ankles. 
With  his  dam  he  was  sold  while  at  her  side  to  Charles  H.  Kerner, 
of  New  York,  who  soon  after  traded  them  to  John  Minchin,  of 
Goshen,  for  the  then  well-known  trotter  Drift,  Mr.  Kerner  also 
paying  a  fair  sum  in  cash.     Later  the  colt  came  into  the  hands 
of  A.  0.  Green,  of  Fall   Eiver,  and   was  by  him  named   Judge 
Brigharn.     It   is   said  that  Mr.   Green  first  learned  that  Judge 
Brigham  was  a  fast  trotter  through  his  taking  fright  at  a  train 
one  day  in  1870  and  running  away  with  him  at  a  trot.     What- 
ever the  facts  as  to  this  are,  it  was  soon  known  that  Mr.    Green 
had  a  very  fast  trotter,  and  the  next  season  (1871)  he  started  for 
a  five-thousand-dollar  purse  at  Buffalo,  among  the  other  starters 
being   the   already   famous   Judge   Fullerton.     To   the   general 
astonishment,  Judge  Brigham  "cut  loose"  in  the  second  heat, 
winning  it  in  2:22,  thus  equaling  the  stallion  record  then  held 
by  George  Wilkes,  and  placing  to  his  credit  the  fastest  heat  ever 
up  to  that  time  trotted  by  a  horse  in  his  maiden  race.     He  won 
the  race  handily,  and  was  the  sensation  of  the  time.     He  was  at 
once  purchased  for,  I  believe,  the  great  price  of  thirty-five  thou- 
sand dollars  by  the  late  world-famous  financier,  Jay  Gould,  H. 
N.  Smith,  and  George  C.  Hall.     Later  Mr.  Smith  acquired  Mr. 
Hall's  interest,  and  Mr.  Kerner  bought  Mr.  Gould's,  and  finally, 
some  years  after,  Mr.  Smith,  who  had  established  Fashion  Stud 
Farm,  at   Trenton,  New   Jersey,    and   owned   the   noted   mares 
Goldsmith   Maid,  2:14,  Lady  Thorn,  2:18^,    and    Lucy,    2:18i, 
became  sole  owner  of  Jay  Gould,  as  Judge  Brigham  was  renamed. 
The  week  following  his  Buffalo  race  Jay  Gould  defeated  an- 
other strong  field  at  Kalamazoo,  Michigan;  and  in  1872  started 
four  times,  winning  in  all  his  races,  lowering  his  record  to  2:21^, 
the  then  champion  stallion  record.     He  was  kept  in  the  stud  in 
1873,  but  being  challenged  on  behalf  of  Bashaw  Jr.,  the  follow- 
ing year,  was  given  a  hurried  fall  preparation,  and  met  his  chal- 
lenger at  Baltimore.     Bashaw  Jr.,  broke  down  in  the  first  heat, 
and  Gould  of  course  won  an  empty  victory,  but  to  satisfy  the 
audience  was  driven  a  public  trial  in  2:19-J.     Meanwhile  Smug- 
gler had  lowered  the  .stallion  record  to  2:20,  and  Jay  Gould  was 
.sent  against  it  at  Boston,  trotting   under  unfavorable  circum- 


stances  in  2:20£  and  2:21|.  This  practically  closed  his  turf 
career.  He  made  a  number  of  seasons  at  Fashion  Farm,  and  in 
his  later  years  at  Walnut  Hill  Farm,  near  Lexington,  Kentucky, 
and  died  of  old  age  June  10,  1894.  Jay  Gould's  opportunities 
were  never  of  the  best.  In  his  earlier  years  in  the  stud  General 
Knox  was  more  used  at  Fashion  Farm  than  Jay  Gould,  and  there 
was  no  training  done  at  Fashion  until  1886.  Jay  Gould  is  the 
sire  of  twenty-nine  standard  performers,  the  most  noted  of  which 
is  the  great  mare  Pixley,  2:08^.  Fourteen  of  his  sons  have  pro- 
duced thirty  standard  performers,  and  twenty-eight  of  his 
daughters  have  produced  forty-six  performers,  among  the  latter 
being  the  great  pacer,  Kobert  J.,  2:0l£,  and  such  trotters  as  Poem, 
2:1H,  Colonel  Kuser,  2:11^,  Mahogany,  2:12£,  Edgardo,  2:13|,  etc. 
His  most  noted  producing  daughter  is  Lucia,  whose  dam  was  the 
famous  old  trotting  mare  Lucy,  2:18^,  by  George  M.  Patchen, 
2:23|.  Lucia  is  the  dam  of  Edgardo,  2:13f,  Hurly  Burly,  2:16i, 
and  several  others  in  the  2:30  list,  and  her  blood  is  breeding  OR 
through  both  her  sons  and  daughters. 

STRATHMORE,  taking  all  things  into  consideration,  must  be 
rated  among  the  very  greatest  sous  of  Hambletonian.  He  was  a, 
solid  bay  horse,  of  the  substantial  Hambletonian  type,  foaled 
1866,  bred  by  Aristides  Welch  at  his  Chestnut  Hill  farm,  near 
Philadelphia,  and  was  got  by  Hambletonian  out  of  the  quite 
famous  trotting  mare  Lady  Waltermire,  by  North  American,  and 
Lady  Waltermire's  dam  was  said  to  have  been  by  Harris'  Ham- 
bletonian. This  North  American  sired  Whitehall,  that  got  the 
famous  trotter  Rhode  Island,  sire  of  the  still  more  celebrated 
Governor  Sprague,  and  in  the  section  treating  of  the  latter  the 
reader  will  find  particulars  concerning  North  American.  Lady 
Waltermire  was  a  noted  trotting  mare  in  her  day,  and  it  has  been 
claimed  that  she  performed  faster  than  2:30,  but  I  have  never 
been  able  to  substantiate  this  claim.  When  Strathmore  was  a, 
three-year-old,  in  1869, 1  visited  Chestnut  Hill.  Mr.  Welch  then 
had  three  sons  of  Hambletonian,  viz.,  William  Welch,  Rysdyk, 
and  Strathmore,  who  was  then  called  Goodwin  Watson.  The  two 
former  were  led  out  to  be  shown,  but  when  I  inquired  for  Good- 
win Watson,  Mr.  Welch's  reply  was  "Oh,  he's  a  pacer" — except 
that  he  used  an  adjective  in  connection  with  "pacer"  that  added 
emphasis,  and  betrayed  some  degree  of  regret,  or  indeed  dis- 
gust. The  fact  that  several  of  Strathmore's  sons  have  gotten 
many  fast  pacers  need  not  be  marveled  at.  I  am  not  aware  that 


310  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

Strathmore  was  ever  trained,  and  probably  his  pacing  inclination 
furnishes  the  reason.  When  he  was  seven  years  old  he  was  pur- 
chased by  Colonel  R.  G.  Stoner,  of  Paris,  Kentucky,  and  named 
Strathmore,  and  up  to  this  time,  Colonel  Stoner  states,  he  had 
but  three  foals,  one  of  which  was  afterward  known  as  Chestnut 
Hill,  2:22%,  the  first  of  his  get  to  earn  a  reputation.  His  first 
two  seasons  were  made  in  Montgomery  County,  after  which  he 
was  taken  to  Paris,  in  Bourbon  County.  Colonel  Stoner  states 
in  one  of  his  catalogues  that  Strathmore's  early  opportunities  in 
Kentucky  were  very  inferior;  that  in  1877  and  1878  the  service 
fees  earned  would  not  pay  for  his  keep;  that  up  to  1879  he 
never  served  a  mare  with  a  record  or  the  dam  of  an  animal  with  a 
record,  and  that  it  was  not  until  Steinway  trotted  in  1878  as  a 
two-year  old  in  2:31f,  and  Santa  Glaus  as  a  five-year-old  in  2:18  in 
1879  that  any  good  mares  came  to  Strathmore.  At  Colonel 
Stoner's  sale,  February  9,  1886,  Strathmore  was  sold  for  two 
thousand  one  hundred  and  fifty  dollars  to  Eockhill  &  Bro.,  of 
Fort  Wayne,  Indiana,  and  they  owned  him  until  his  death, 
March  11,  1895.  Strathmore  has  seventy-one  in  the  standard 
list;  twenty-six  of  his  sons  and  fifty-four  of  his  daughters  have 
produced  one  hundred  and  fifty-eight  standard  performers. 

EGBERT  is  one  of  the  youngest  sons  of  Hambletonian,  and  has 
achieved  very  fair  success  in  the  stud.  He  is  closely  inbred  to 
the  Hambletonian,  or  rather  the  Abdallah  blood,  and  is  possibly 
the  most  notable  instance  of  a  successful  sire  being  very  closely 
inbred.  Egbert  was  bred  by  Hon.  J.  H.  Walker,  Worcester, 
Massachusetts,  and  was  foaled  in  1875.  He  was  sold  at  the  sale 
•of  Mr.  Walker's  horses  at  Worcester  in  the  autumn  of  1877, 
when  he  was  purchased  for  the  then  great  price  for  a  two-year- 
old  of  three  thousand  four  hundred  and  twenty-five  dollars  by 
H.  J.  Hendryx,  of  Michigan,  a  representative  of  Mr.  Veech,  of 
Kentucky,  being  a  contending  bidder.  After  the  sale  Mr. 
Hendryx  sold  the  colt  for  four  thousand  dollars  to  George  W. 
Raudenbush,  of  Reading,  Pennsylvania,  who  I  believe  still  owns 
him.  In  the  spring  of  1880  Egbert  was  taken  by  Colonel  Richard 
West  to  his  farm  at  Georgetown,  Kentucky,  and  kept  there  a 
number  of  years,  and  indeed  the  greater  part  of  his  stud  career 
has  been  in  Kentucky.  I  am  not  aware  that  Egbert  was  ever 
trained.  He  is  individually  a  superior  horse,  but  is  alleged  to 
have  an  unkind  disposition. 

Egbert  was  got  by  Hambletonian  out  of  Campdown,  by  Mes- 


HAMBLETONIAN'S   SONS   AND   GRANDSONS.  311 

senger  Duroc  (son  of  Hambletonian) ;  grandam  Miss  McLeod 
(dam  of  Lord  Nelson,  2:26£,  and  Polonius),  by  the  Holbert  Colt 
(son  of  Hambletonian) ;  great-grandam  May  Fly,  by  Utter  Horse, 
son  of  Hoyt's  Comet;  great-great-grandam  Virgo,  sister  to  the 
dam  of  Messenger  Duroc,  by  Roe's  Abdallah  Chief,  son  of  Ab- 
dallah,  the  sire  of  Hambletonian.  The  Holbert  Colt,  son  of 
Hambletonian,  was  a  pacer,  and  others  in  Egbert's  ancestry  paced; 
and  in  commenting  on  his  pedigree,  from  this  point  of  view,  at 
the  time  Colonel  West  took  him  to  Kentucky,  I  remarked  in 
Wallace's  Monthly,  March,  1880:  "Colonel  West  need  not  be 
surprised  if  he  finds  quite  a  number  of  Egbert's  offspring  start- 
ing off  at  a  pace."  The  facts  have  borne  out  the  prediction,  as  a 
glance  at  Egbert's  long  list  of  fast  pacers  will  show.  Egbert  is 
the  sire  of  seventy-five  standard  performers,  while  twenty-five  of 
his  sons,  and  eighteen  of  his  daughters  have  produced  seventy- 
four  standard  performers. 

MASTERLODE,  that  left  a  family  of  some  merit  in  Michigan,  was 
a  mammoth  bay,  foaled  1868,  got  by  Hambletonian  out  of  Lady 
Irwin  by  Seeley's  American  Star.  He  was  a  gigantic,  coarse 
horse,  and  was  certainly  the  largest  horse  that  ever  earned 
a  reputation  as  a  sire  of  trotters.  It  is  said  he  was  quite  seven- 
teen hands  high  and  was  built  on  a  heavy  mold  even  for  his 
height.  He  was  bred  by  James  M.  Mills,  Orange  County,  New 
York,  and  passed  to  A.  C.  Fisk,  Coldwater,  Michigan,  who 
owned  him  until  his  death  in  1892.  The  most  noted  of  his  get 
was  Belle  F.,  2:15^,  that  was  one  of  the  very  best  campaigners  out 
in  1886.  He  has  twenty-eight  to  his  credit  in  the  list,  and  seven- 
teen of  his  sons  and  sixteen  of  his  daughters  have  produced  in  all 
fifty-seven  standard  performers. 

ABERDEEN'  shares  with  Dictator  such  honors  as  attach  to  the 
highest  success  of  the  "Hambletonian-Star  cross"  in  the  stud. 
This  horse  was  bred  by  the  notorious  Captain  Isaiah  Rynders,  at 
Passaic,  New  Jersey,  and  a  full  account  of  the  investigation  of  the 
pedigree  of  his  dam,  the  noted  Widow  Machree,  2:29,  will  be  found 
in  Chapter  XXIX.,  on  the  investigation  of  pedigrees.  Widow 
Machree  was  altogether  the  best  trotter  of  the  American  Star 
family,  and  was  especially  noted  for  her  gameness.  Bred  to 
Hambletonian,  it  was  natural  that  she  should  produce  a  trotter, 
and  Aberdeen  was  quite  a  trotter  in  his  day.  As  a  three-year- 
old  he  won  a  stake  at  Prospect  Park,  distancing  his  field  in  2:46, 
and  the  statement  has  been  published  that  hs  later  in  his  career 


31%  THE    HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

trotted  a  slow  New  Jersey  track  in  2:24^.  This  horse  was  foaled 
in  1866,  and  was  a  bay  fifteen  hands  three  inches  high,  and  very 
stoutly,  indeed  coarsely  made,  and  was  of  a  dangerously  vicious 
disposition.  The  good  race  mare  Hattie  Woodward,  that  made 
a  record  of  2:15^,  first  attracted  attention  to  Aberdeen  as  a  sire, 
and  in  1881  he  was  purchased  by  General  Withers  and  taken  to 
Fairlawn,  and  before  this  his  stud  opportunities  had  been  very 
limited.  He  died  in  1892.  By  far  the  best  of  his  get  is  the 
great  mare  Kentucky  Union,  that  made  a  record  of  2:07^  in  1896. 
Aberdeen  has  forty  in  the  standard  list,  fourteen  of  his  sons  have 
produced  fifty-seven,  and  seventeen  of  his  daughters  have  pro- 
duced nineteen  standard  performers. 

SWEEPSTAKES  must  be  classed  among  the  successful  sons  of 
Hambletonian  as  a  sire  of  trotters,  though  in  the  second  genera- 
tion his  family  have  yet  failed  of  great  distinction,  nor  did 
Sweepstakes  himself  get  extreme  speed.  This  was  a  bay  horse, 
foaled  1867,  by  Hambletonian  out  of  Emma  Mills,  that  also  pro- 
duced Mott's  Independent,  by  Seely's  American  Star.  He  was 
bred  by  the  late  Harrison  Mills,  near  Goshen,  in  Orange  County, 
New  York,  and  was  never,  I  believe,  trained.  Indeed  it  lias 
been  stated  that  he  never  wore  harness,  and  is  perhaps  the  most 
remarkable  example  of  a  strictly  undeveloped  sire  of  trotters. 
The  most  noted  of  his  get  is  the  bay  horse  Captain  Lyons,  2:17^. 
Sweepstakes  sired  thirty-three  trotters  and  two  pacers  that  are 
standard  performers,  four  sons  have  produced  eight  trotters  and 
two  pacers,  and  twenty  of  his  daughters  have  produced  twenty- 
five  trotters  and  four  pacers. 

GOVERNOR  SPRAGUE  is  one  of  the  few  horses  not  descended  in 
the  male  line  from  one  of  the  great  foundation  progenitors,  and 
that  yet  was  a  trotter  of  merit  and  the  founder  of  a  trotting  family. 
His  dam,  however,  was  a  producing  daughter  of  Hambletonian, 
and  this  must  be  regarded  as  the  probable  source  of  his  power, 
though  his  sire  was  a  fine  trotter  for  his  day. 

Back  in  the  thirties  a  Frenchman  living  at  Rouse's  Point, 
New  York,  near  the  Canadian  boundary  line,  bred  a  pacing  mare 
to  a  horsa  that  was  kept  in  the  same  stable  with  Sir  Walter, 
thoroughbred  son  of  Hickory,  and  the  result  was  the  horse 
known  as  North  American,  or  the  Bullock  Horse.  It  was  long 
claimed  that  North  American  was  by  Sir  Walter,  but  the  best 
authenticated  version  is  given  in  Wallace's  Monthly,  for  1880. 
This  was  the  statement  of  a  Mr.  Ladd,  said  to  be  a  reliable  man,  who 


HAMBLETOXIAX'S   SOXS    AXD    GRAXDSOXS.  313 

knew  the  Frenchman  who  bred  North  American.  Ladd  had  for- 
merly lived  at  Rouse's  Point,  and  kept  a  little  hotel  at  Benson's 
Landing  on  Lake  Champlain.  Ladd's  statement  was  that  the 
Frenchman  had  a  little  pacing  mare,  from  which  he  wanted  to  raise 
a  foal,  but  would  not  pay  more  than  three  dollars  for  any  horse's 
service.  Sir  Walter's  fee  was  fifteen  dollars,  but  in  the  same 
stable  was  a  large  stallion  that  was  used  to  haul  water  from  the 
lake  to  the  hotel,  and  the  Frenchman  was  permitted  to  have  the 
service  of  this  horse  for  three  dollars,  and  this  is  the  only  reliable 
version  I  could  ever  obtain  as  to  the  pedigree  of  North  American. 
Besides  the  line  we  are  now  considering,  this  horse  got  Lady 
Waltermire,  the  dam  of  the  great  Strathmore,  and  one  of  his 
daughters  is  the  dam  of  two  in  the  2:30  list,  and  Vergennes  Black 
Hawk  came  from  another.  North  America  was  said  to  have 
been  a  natural  trotter,  and  quite  fast  for  a  short  distance.  A 
son  of  his,  named  Whitehall,  from  the  name  of  the  place  where 
he  was  bred,  was  taken  to  Ohio  from  New  York  about  1854  and 
there  got  the  noted  Rhode  Island,  2:23^,  the  sire  of  Governor 
Sprague.  Rhode  Island  was  a  brown  horse,  foaled  about  1857, 
and  his  dam  was  by  a  black  horse  called  Davy  Crockett  that  was 
brought  from  Pennsylvania,  and  her  dam  was  called  Bald  Hornet. 
This  mare,  Mag  Taylor,  was  bred  to  Whitehall  twice,  one  of  her 
foals  being  Belle  Rice,  the  dam  of  the  stallion  Harry  Wilkes,  sire 
of  Rosalind  Wilkes,  2:14i,  and  the  other  was  Rhode  Island.  This 
horse  trotted  many  races,  and  at  Fashion  Course,  New  York, 
October  27,  1868,  earned  his  record  of  2:23|.  He  about  this  time 
passed  into  the  hands  of  Sprague  &  Akers,  and  he  died  in  1875. 
At  this  time  Governor  Amasa  Sprague  had  among  his  brood 
mares  Belle  Brandon,  by  Rysdyk's  Hambletonian  out  of  a 
daughter  of  Young  Bacchus.  This  was  a  bay  mare,  foaled  in 
1854  in  Orange  County,  and  was  a  fast  trotter  and  a  mare  of 
great  general  excellence.  She  was  driven  as  a  mate  to  Sprague's 
Hambletonian,  and  Mr.  Sprague  claimed  that  he  had  once  driven 
her  a  mile  in  2 :29.  Bred  to  Volunteer  she  produced  Amy,  2:20i, 
and  to  Rhode  Island,  produced  in  1872,  Governor  Sprague,  2:20|. 
Governor  Sprague  was  a  black  horse,  approximating  fifteen 
hands  two  inches  in  height,  and  very  substantially  built.  He  is 
described  as  having  been  an  exceedingly  handsome  horse,  es- 
pecially in  action,  his  gait  having  been  pure  and  beautiful.  In 
1873  he  was  sent  to  Kansas  and  trained,  and  so  promising  was  he 
that  he  was  that  year  sold  to  Higbee  Brothers  and  Mr.  Babcock, 


314  THE    HOUSE   OF   AMERICA. 

of  Canton,  Illinois,  for  one  thousand  five  hundred  dollars.  He 
was  shown  and  known  as  a  very  fast  four-year-old,  trotting 
public  exhibitions  in  about  2:22.  With  the  exception  of  a  three- 
year-old  race  at  Earlville,  Illinois,  he  did  not  stajt  in  a  public 
race  until  July  20,  1876,  when  at  Chicago  he  easily  defeated  a 
good  field,  and  so  promising  and  attractive  did  he  seem  that  the 
late  Jerome  I.  Case,  of  Racine,  paid  the  great  price  of  twenty- 
seven  thousand  five  hundred  dollars  for  him.  At  Poughkeepsie, 
New  York,  that  season  he  lowered  his  record  to  2:20£,  and  a  few 
more  races  ended  his  short  but  brilliant  turf  career.  He  died  at 
Lexington,  Kentucky,  May  23,  1883,  at  the  early  age  of  eleven 
years.  His  stud  career  was  therefore  short,  and  this  fact  we 
must  remember  in  estimating  his  rank  as  a  sire.  Kate  Sprague, 
2:18,  and  Linda  Sprague,  2:19,  were  about  the  best  of  his  imme- 
diate progeny,  and  Rounds'  Sprague,  that  has  twenty  trotters 
and  pacers  in  the  2:30  list,  some  of  them  in  better  than  2:20,  seems 
to  be  his  most  successful  son.  Governor  Sprague  has  to  his  credit 
thirty-six  trotters  and  two  pacers  with  standard  records,  twenty- 
two  of  his  sons  have  sired  fifty-four  trotters  and  fifteen  pacers, 
and  his  daughters  have  produced  twenty-three  trotters  and  six 
pacerj.  There  was  nothing  in  the  inheritance  of  Rhode  Island  to 
justify  a  supposition  that  he  would  transmit  speed  uniformly,  and, 
like  Smuggler,  the  speed-getting  power  with  him  was  sporadic. 
But  from  his  dam,  Belle  Brandon,  Governor  Sprague  received  the 
blood  of  Hambletonian  through  an  individual  that  had  speed 
herself  and  naturally  produced  speed;  and  this  strain,  combined 
with  the  blood  of  a  horse  that  was  good  enough  in  his  day  to  beat 
Lucy,  American  Girl  and  George  Wilkes,  gave  Governor  Sprague 
a  right  to  be  all  that  he  was. 


CHAPTER    XXI11. 

MAMBRINO   CHIEF  AND   HIS  FAMILY. 

Description  and  history  of  Mambrino  Chief — The  pioneer  trotting  stallion  of 
Kentucky — Matched  against  Pilot  Jr. — His  best  sons — Mambrino  Patchen, 
his  opportunities  and  family — Woodford  Mambrino,  a  notable  trotter  and 
sire — Princess — Mambrino  Pilot — Other  sons  of  Mambrino  Chief. 

MAMBRIXO  CHIEF  was  a  dark  bay  or  brown  horse,  got  by 
Mambrino  Paymaster,  grandson  of  imported  Messenger,  and  his 
dam  was  a  large,  coarse  mare  that  was  brought  from  the  West  in 
a  drove,  and  absolutely  nothing  was  known  of  her  blood .  The 
theory  was  once  advanced  in  print  that  she  must  have  been  by 
Stevens'  Messenger  Duroc,  but  I  think  it  was  never  repeated. 
The  basis  of  this  theory  was,  that  the  horse  referred  to  was  large 
and  coarse,  with  a  long  thigh  bone,  and  as  the  mare  was  large  and 
coarse,  with  a  long  thigh  bone,  she  must  have  been  a  daughter  of 
his.  There  are  some  obvious  difficulties  about  accepting  this 
* ''thigh-bone"  pedigree.  In  the  first  place,  the  inventor  of  it 
never  saw  either  the  horse  or  the  mare,  and  how  could  he  have 
put  his  tapeline  on  their  "thigh-bones"  and  thus  ascertained 
they  were  of  the  same  length?  In  the  second  place,  it  is  not 
known,  nor  was  it  known  to  the  inventor,  that  the  horse  ever  had 
been  within  three  hundred  miles  of  the  dam  of  this  "daughter" 
of  his.  It  is  not  much  wonder  that  the  "horse  business"  is 
hardly  considered  reputable  when  an  educated  man  will  advance 
such  senseless  gabble  as  the  basis  of  a  pedigree.  This  mare  pro- 
duced another  colt  called  Goliah  that  developed  some  speed,  but 
this  was  not  the  Goliah  that  was  on  the  trotting  turf. 

Mambrino  Chief  was  bred  by  Richard  Eldridge,  of  Dutchess 
County,  New  York,  and  was  owned  by  Warren  Williams;  in  the 
spring  of  1851  he  passed  into  the  hands  of  James  M.  Cockroft 
and  G.  T.  Williams;  was  kept  two  or  three  seasons  in  Ulster 
County;  trotted,  under  the  saddle  a  trial  in  2:36;  sold  to  James 
B.  Clay  of  Kentucky,  in  the  winter  of  1854,  and  then  to  Gray  ^ 


316  THE   HORSE   OF   AMEHICA. 

Jones,  1857,  for  five  thousand  and  twenty  dollars,  and  died  1861. 
Soon  after  his  arrival  in  Kentucky  he  was  matched  to  trot  against 
Pilot  Jr.,  and  the  match  stirred  up  a  great  deal  of  interest 
among  the  breeders.  He  was  so  big  and  coarse  and  so  far  re- 
moved from  the  type  of  the  running  horse  that  very  few  believed 
he  could  show  any  speed  at  any  gait,  for  the  distance  of  a  mile 
and  repeat.  He  was  placed  in  the  hands  of  Dr.  Herr,  who  had 
had  some  experience  in  handling  trotters,  for  preparation.  When 
the  day  came  there  was  quite  an  assemblage  to  witness  the  race 
but  the  Pilot  Jr.  party  came  forward  and  paid  forfeit.  This  was 
a  sore  disappointment  to  those  who  thought  the  big  horse  could 
not  trot,  and  to  satisfy  them  that  he  could  trot  and  trot  fast,  Dr. 
Herr  drove  him  to  show  his  gait,  and  notwithstanding  his  quarter 
cracks  he  satisfied  all  that  he  really  was  a  trotter.  This  was  an 
auspicious  opening  of  a  successful  career  extending  through  the 
remaining  six  years  of  his  life. 

In  the  sense  of  success,  Mambrino  Chief  was  really  the  pioneer 
trotting  stallion  of  Kentucky.  True,  "  Old  "  Abdallah  had  been 
there  fourteen  years  earlier,  but  he  was  in  bad  shape  and  breeders 
did  not  like  him.  He  was  very  plain  in  his  appearance  and  only 
left  some  half-dozen  of  foals  behind  him  when  he  was  brought  back 
to  Long  Island.  The  breeders  all  turned  to  his  stable  companion, 
Commodore,  that  was  more  after  the  pattern  of  the  running  horse, 
and  would  not  look  at  Abdallah.  This  Commodore  filled  the 
blue-grass  fields  with  his  foals,  but  none  of  them  could  trot.  He 
was  a  son  of  Mambrino,  by  imported  Messenger,  and  was  an  in- 
bred Messenger,  if  his  pedigree  was  right,  but  he  was  a  failure  as 
a  trotting  sire.  Mr.  Marcus  Downing  took  his  horse,  Bay  Mes- 
senger, there  about  the  same  time  and  he  was  a  failure  also,  not- 
withstanding he  was  a  grandson  of  imported  Messenger.  Both 
Commodore  and  Bay  Messenger  should  have  been  trotting  sires, 
but  either  one  of  two  reasons  was  sufficient  to  prevent  that  con- 
summation. First  their  blood  and  physical  structure  were  all 
right,  but  the  mental  structure — the  instinct  to  trot — was  lack- 
ing; they  inherited  from  some  ancestor  that  could  not  and  was 
not  inclined  to  trot.  Second,  Kentuckians  of  that  period  knew 
nothing  about  trotters  and  they  may  have  lacked  in  the  requisite 
knowledge,  skill  and  patience  to  develop  them.  It  is  true  that 
old  Pacing  Pilot  and  some  other  pacing  tribes  were  there  that 
would  occasionally  throw  a  pacer  with  the  diagonal  motion,  like 
Pilot  Jr.,  but  there  was  no  other  blood  there  that  trotted  before  the 


MAMBRINO   CHIEF  AND   HIS   FAMILY.  317 

arrival  of  Mambrino  Chief.  This  pacing  element  was  a  very 
valuable  element  upon  which  to  build  up  the  trotter,  but  unfor- 
tunately and  wherever  it  was  possible,  a  running  pedigree  was 
tacked  on  to  the  pacer,  and  thus,  in  the  estimation  of  Kentuck- 
ians  it  was  the  running  blood  that  did  it. 

The  six  years  of  his  services  in  Kentucky  gave  sufficient  time 
to  establish  his  value  as  a  trotting  sire,  but  not  sufficient  to  build 
up  a  large  family.  This  limited  period  must  be  further  re- 
stricted, in  estimating  his  value,  by  the  fact  that  the  war  broke 
out  in  1861,  at  the  very  time  when  the  larger  part  of  his  offspring 
were  just  at  the  right  age  for  development.  This  important  fact 
has  been  very  generally  overlooked  when  estimating  the  true 
value  of  this  horse.  The  question  has  often  been  asked  why 
this  horse  succeeded  in  Kentucky  when  he  had  not  succeeded  in 
the  North?  This  is  too  broad  a  question  to  be  considered  in  this 
historical  sketch,  but  will  be  considered  at  another  place  in  this 
volume.  In  passing  it,  some  very  intelligent  writers  have  at- 
tributed it  to  what  is  called  "the  climatic  outcross,"  and  there 
may  be  some  real  value  in  this  point,  but  the  great  cause,  aside 
from  the  new  surroundings  and  expectations  of  his  progeny,  may 
be  found  in  the  fact  that  his  own  speed  was  never  developed 
until  the  very  eve  of  his  transfer  to  Kentucky.  His  instinct  to 
trot  and  to  trot  fast  had  remained  dormant,  practically,  during 
the  whole  period  of  his  Northern  service,  and  when  he  reached 
Kentucky  he  was,  in  a  sense,  a  new  horse  and  conscious  of  his 
powers  as  a  trotter.  The  salutary  effects  of  development,  at 
whatever  gait,  have  been  shown  in  ten  thousand  instances  and 
will  continue  to  be  shown  as  long  as  the  interests  and  ambitions 
of  man  shall  prompt  him  to  strive  to  surpass  his  neighbor. 

At  one  time  it  was  maintained  right  vehemently  by  the  owners 
of  the  stock  of  Mambrino  Chief,  as  well  as  some  others,  that  as  a 
stock  horse  he  was  not  only  equal  but  superior  to  Hambletonian. 
In  1867,  when  the  battles  were  raging  between  Dexter  and  Lady 
Thorn,  this  view  showed  little  abatement,  and  notwithstanding  the 
gelding  was  beating  the  mare  all  the  time,  they  still  maintained 
that  in  the  end  she  would  be  the  conqueror.  When  Lady  Thorn 
was  seriously  crippled  and  retired  from  the  turf,  there  were  many 
sad  hearts  in  the  Mambrino  family  and  many  wonderful  stories 
were  told,  privately,  of  what  Dan  Mace  had  seen  her  do,  and  that 
he  was  keeping  very  quiet  till  an  opportunity  came  to  show  the 
most  wonderful  flight  of  speed  that  the  world  had  ever  seen  or 


•318 


THE   HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 


ever  would  see.     With  the  shroud  of  what  "might  have  been" 
about  them,  they  were  "of  the  same  opinion  still." 

Mambrino  Chief  left  six  in  the  2:30  list;  twenty-three  sons  that 
put  ninety-five  in  the  list  and  seventeen  daughters  that  produced 
twenty-four  trotters. 

LEADING   SONS   OF   MAMBRINO   CHIEF. 


E 

g 

CO 

a 

•v  o 

0> 

to 

03 

*  -15 

g 

a 

^ 

£ 

a  s 

0 

i 

be 

^  ?^ 

^  'In    W 

Name. 

1 

1 

" 

it 

tUD 

.s 

*S 

1§ 

to  £  a 

D    O 

ji 

a 

3 

o  ^ 

!r* 

fl 

ro 

^3 

T^  r^ 

c5   "^    fl 

§ 

iS 

oi 

O2 

£ 

£ 

£§ 

H-3    D    d) 

£     P^&D 

Mambrino  Patcben        

1862 

1885 

25 

51 

90 

259 

284 

Woodford  Mambrino,  2:21£.  . 

1863 

1879 

13 

23 

24 

172 

185 

Mambrino  Pilot   2'34f 

1859 

1885 

9 

17 

15 

71 

80 

Clark  CHef  

1861 

1871 

6 

12 

25 

43 

49 

Ericsson,  2:  30|  

1856 

188- 

6 

4 

15 

25 

31 

Mambrino  Chief  Jr.  (Fisk's).. 

1861 

189- 

5 

6 

14 

34 

39 

MAMBRINO  PATCHED  was  the  best  son  of  Mambrino  Chief  and 
was  brother  to  Lady  Thorn,  2:18J.  He  was  foaled  1862,,  after  the 
death  of  his  sire,  and  was  bred  by  Levi  T.  Rodes.  His  dam  was 
by  Gano,  a  running-bred  son  of  American  Eclipse;  his  grandam 
was  a  pacing  mare  by  a  colt  of  Sir  William,  but  what  Sir  William 
is  not  known;  his  great-grandam  was  an  inveterate  pacer  and 
never  was  known  to  strike  any  other  gait.  Mambrino  Patchen 
was  so  much  smoother  and  handsomer  than  his  sire,  and  was  so 
much  of  a  failure  as  a  trotter, that  a  very  strong  conviction  prevailed 
among  the  friends  and  neighbors  of  his  owner  that  he  was  not  a  son 
of  Mambrino  Chief,  nor  a  brother  of  Lady  Thorn.  To  this  story 
that  he  was  a  Denmark  and  not  a  Mambrino  Chief  I  never  have 
given  any  shadow  of  credence.  The  attempt  of  his  owner,  Dr. 
Herr,  to  make  him  a  trotter  was  patient  and  persistent,  extend- 
ing through  several  years,  but  with  all  his  skill  and  experience  he 
failed.  Nobody  was  ever  able  to  "catch"  him  a  mile,  but  it 
seems  to  have  been  conceded  that  he  might  go  somewhere  in  the 
"forties."  While  this  persistent  and  long-continued  training 
failed  in  its  original  purpose  of  giving  the  horse  a  record  of  repu- 
table speed,  there  can  be  no  doubt,  under  the  law  that  governs, 
.that  this  development  did  great  good  to  the  horse,  as  a  progenitor 


MAMBRLNX)    CHIEF   AND    HIS   FAMILY.  319 

of  trotters.  The  conditions  being  a  handsome  horse,  with  the 
banner  constantly  flying  over  him,  "full  brother  to  Lady  Thorn," 
an  industrious  and  very  capable  owner,  in  the  heart  of  the  great- 
est breeding  region  in  the  whole  country,  it  is  easy  to  account  for 
a  very  wide  and  lucrative  patronage.  Still,  as  a  getter  of  speed 
he  was  not  a  great  success,  and  as  a  getter  of  high  speed  he  was  a 
failure.  With  all  the  facilities  for  development,  only  twenty-five 
of  his  progeny  have  found  a  place  in  the  2:30  list,  the  fastest  of 
which  has  a  record  of  2:20j-.  Of  his  sons,  fifty-one  are  the  sires  of 
one  hundred  and  twenty-six  trotters,  and  of  his  daughters,  ninety 
have  produced  one  hundred  and  twenty-nine  standard  per- 
formers. He  has  proved  himself  a  very  great  sire  of  brood  mares, 
and  when  his  daughters  are  bred  to  horses  of  stronger  inherit- 
ance, they  stand  among  the  best. 

WOODFORD  MAMBRIXO. — This  son  of  Mambrino  Chief  was  a 
large  brown  horse,  foaled  1862.  He  was  bred  by  Mr.  Mason 
Henry,  of  Woodford  County,  Kentucky.  His  dam  was  also  the 
dam  of  other  trotters,  was  got  by  Woodford,  son  of  Kosciusko, 
and  her  dam  was  a  farm  mare  without  any  known  breeding. 
Woodford  was  a  large,  strong  horse  used  only  for  farm  work,  to 
which  he  was  well  suited.  After  spending  a  good  deal  of  time 
and  labor  on  his  pedigree  I  am  constrained  to  say  that  while  he 
may  have  been  a  son  of  Kosciusko,  his  dam's  breeding  is  worse 
than  unsatisfactory.  W^oodford  Mambrino  made  a  record  of 
2:21£,  and  placed  thirteen  of  his  get  in  the  2:30  list.  He  left 
twenty-three  sons  that  were  the  sires  of  standard  performers, 
and  twenty-four  daughters  that  produced  twenty-seven  standard 
performers.  His  son,  Princeps,  owned  by  Mr.  R.  S.  Yeech,  of 
Indian  Hill  Farm,  near  Louisville,  Kentucky,  was  in  the  stud 
far  and  away  the  best  of  his  sons,  and  although  he  had  no  record 
of  his  own  he  placed  in  the  list  forty-four  trotters  and  four 
pacers,  many  of  them  with  fast  records. 

MAMBRIXO  PILOT  was  a  very  large  and  very  coarse  horse.  He 
was  a  brown,  got  by  Mambrino  Chief,  foaled  1859,  dam  Juliet,  by 
Pilot  Jr.;  grandam  by  Webster,  son  of  Medoc;  great-grandam  by 
Whip.  He  was  bred  by  Thomas  Hook,  of  Scott  County,  Kentucky, 
and  after  passing  through  the  hands  of  Dr.  Herr  and  others 
he  was  sold  to  C.  P.  Relf ,  of  Philadelphia,  and,  I  think,  remained 
in  his  family  till  he  died,  1885.  He  had  a  record  to  saddle 
of  2:27^.  He  put  nine  of  his  get  into  the  2:30  list,  and  seventeen 


320  THE    HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

of  his  sons  left  fifty-one  performers  and  fourteen  of  his  daughters 
produced  twenty  performers. 

Many  others  of  the  descendants  of  Mambrino  Chief  might  be 
noticed,  but  it  is  not  the  purpose  of  this  volume  to  dwell  upon 
matters  that  are  accessible  in  the  current  literature  of  the  trot- 
ting horse.  The  foundations  of  breeds  and  the  leading  heads  of 
tribes  must  command  my  labor.  The  table  shows  the  rank  of 
the  other  sons  of  Mambrino  Chief  that  achieved  any  degree  of 
success,  and  of  these  clearly  the  best  was  Clark  Chief,  that  died 
at  ten  years  old. 


CHAPTER    XXIV. 

THE  CLAYS  AND   BASHAWS. 

The  imported  Barb,  Grand  Bashaw — Young  Bashaw,  an  inferior  individual — 
His  greatest  son,  Andrew  Jackson — His  dam  a  trotter  and  pacer — His  his- 
tory— His  noted  son,  Kemble  Jackson — Long  Island  Black  Hawk — Henry 
Clay,  founder  of  the  Clay  family — Cassius  M.  Clay — The  various  horses 
named  Cassius  M.  Clay — George  M.  Patchen — His  great  turf  career — 
George  M.  Patchen  Jr. — Harry  Clay — The  Moor,  and  his  son  Sultan's 
family. 

THIS  family  is  no  longer  prominent  in  trotting  annals  and  its 
blood  has  been  practically  absorbed  by  other  strains  that  have 
proved  themselves  more  potent  in  transmitting  and  more  uniform 
and  more  speedy  in  performing.  The  name  "Bashaw  Family" 
is  a  misnomer  and  it  should  never  have  been  used,  but  as  it  has 
represented,  for  many  years,  the  oldest  line  of  developed  speed,  it 
seems  a  necessity  to  recognize  it  here.  A  branch  of  this  family, 
designated  as  "The  Clay  Family"  has  perpetuated  itself  in  some 
strength  and  will  be  considered  in  this  chapter. 

GBAND  BASHAW,  the  horse  that  gave  this  family  its  name,  was 
imported  from  Tripoli  by  Richard  B.  Jones,  who  was  the  American 
consul  at  that  port.  Mr.  Morgan  was  associated  with  him,  and  they 
imported  at  the  same  time  two  other  Barbs,  Grand  Sultan  and 
Saladin.  Grand  Bashaw  was  kept  in  Lower  Merion,  Montgomery 
County,  Pennsylvania,  several  years;  Grand  Sultan  was  kept  in 
New  Salem,  New  Jersey,  for  a  time,  and  Saladin  was  taken  to 
North  Carolina  and  afterward  died  in  Georgia.  From  these 
three  horses  nothing  has  been  left  to  the  horse  history  of  the 
country  but  one  single  attenuated  line.  Grand  Bashaw  was  a 
black  horse,  fourteen  hands  and  an  inch  high,  with  a  star  and  a 
snip  on  his  nose.  He  was  kept  all  his  life  in  the  vicinity  of 
Philadelphia,  and  died  at  Newtown,  Pennsylvania,  1845. 

YOUXG  BASHAW  was  a  grey  horse,  about  fifteen  and  one-quarter 
hands  high,  and  is  the  only  descendant  of  Grand  Bashaw  through 
which  we  can  trace  to  that  horse.  He  was  foaled  1822  and  was 


322  THE    HOESE    OF   AMEEICA. 

bred  by  Thomas  Logan,  of  Montgomery  County,  Pennsylvania. 
His  dam  was  Pearl,  by  Bond's  First  Consul,  a  famous  running 
horse,  his  grandam  Fancy,  by  imported  Messenger,  and  his  great- 
grandam  by  imported  Rockingham.  This  is  the  pedigree  under 
which  he  was  advertised,  but  it  has  never  been  authenticated  in 
any  of  its  crosses.  Judging  by  the  horse  himself  and  his  progeny 
there  can  hardly  be  a  doubt  that  there  was  a  Messenger  cross  in 
it,  but  just  where  cannot  be  determined. 

He  made  his  first  season  in  Salem,  New  Jersey,  1826.  He  was 
then  four  years  old  and  by  no  means  handsome  or  attractive  in 
his  form.  His  head,  ear  and  neck  were  his  worst  features;  but 
in  addition  to  these  defects  he  was  flat  on  the  ribs  and  habitually 
carried  his  tail  to  one  side.  His  limbs  and  feet  were  as  good  as 
ever  were  made,  but  his  great  redeeming  quality  was  his  trotting 
gait.  When  in  Salem  he  was  only  a  rough,  partly  developed, 
four-year-old  colt,  but  he  showed  then  a  step  and  a  rate  of  speed 
so  remarkable  as  to  induce  a  few  to  breed  to  him,  notwithstand- 
ing his  ungainly  appearance.  He  did  not  cover  more  than  a 
dozen  mares  that  season,  and  all-told  he  got  eight  foals.  Out  of 
these  eight,  seven  proved  to  be  superior  trotters  for  that  day. 
Andrew  Jackson  was  the  best,  but  there  was  another  that  could 
go  below  2:40.  The  common  remark  was,  wherever  he  touched  a 
mare  of  Messenger  blood,  there  was  sure  to  come  a  trotter.  This 
was  the  general  rule,  but  the  best  hit  he  ever  made,  probably, 
was  when  he  covered  Joseph  Hancock's  black  pacing  mare  and 
got  Andrew  Jackson. 

In  looking  over  his  blood  elements  we  can  see  nothing  in  his 
pedigree  to  justify  these  trotting  qualities  except  the  grandam, 
Fancy,  by  Messenger.  First  Consul  was  a  great  race  horse,  but 
neither  he  nor  his  descendants  ever  evinced  a  disposition  to  trot. 
The  horse  Rockingham  was  contemporaneous  with  Messenger 
and  a  constant  rival  while  Messenger  was  about  Philadelphia. 
He  was  not  wholly  running-bred,  as  he  was  by  Towser,  afterward 
called  Counsellor,  and  out  of  a  hunting  mare.  As  a  stock  horse 
he  was  esteemed  as  only  second  to  Messenger  on  the  Delaware, 
where  he  stood  many  years. 

The' fame  of  Young  Bashaw  did  not  cease  nor  die  out  after  the 
exploits  of  Andrew  Jackson,  Black  Bashaw,  Charlotte  Temple, 
Washington  and  others  from  his  own  loins.  The  Clays,  the 
Long  Island  Black  Hawks  and  the  Patchens  have  kept  spreading 
it  wider  and  wider  until  of  late  years  we  find  that  only  the  one 


THE   CLAYS   AND   BASHAWS.  323 

great  Hambletonian  family  has  overshadowed  them  all.  Young 
Bashaw,  after  eleven  years  in  the  stud  along  the  Delaware  River, 
above  and  below  Philadelphia,  died  at  Morrisville,  Bucks  County, 
Pennsylvania,  June,  1837. 

ANDREW  JACKSOX  was  the  most  noted  son  of  Young  Bashaw. 
He  was  a  black  horse,  fifteen  and  a  half  hands  high,  with  three 
white  feet  and  a  strip  of  white  in  his  face.  He  was  very  well 
formed  in  every  point  and  was  strong,  compact,  short-legged  and 
handsome.  He  was  foaled  1827,  and  was  bred  by  Joseph  Hancock, 
of  Salem,  New  Jersey.  His  dam  was  a  strong,  compact  black 
mare  that  both  trotted  and  paced,  and  was  noted  for  her  speed  at 
the  latter  gait.  This  mare  was  brought  in  a  drove  from  Ohio,  in 
the  spring  of  1820  and  on  the  twenty-first  of  June  of  that  year  she 
was  sold  to  Mr.  Hancock,  of  Salem,  New  Jersey,  for  one  hundred 
•dollars.  He  kept  her  a  little  over  six  years,  and  in  the  spring  of 
1826  bred  her  to  Young  Bashaw,  and  in  the  fall  of  that  year  sold  her 
to  Powell  Carpenter;  and  soon  after  he  sold  her  to  Daniel  Jeffreys, 
-a  brickmaker  on  the  Germantown  road,  near  Philadelphia.  She 
was  then  in  foal  by  Young  Bashaw,  and  the  next  spring  she 
-dropped  the  colt  that  became  famous  as  Andrew  Jackson. 

The  incidents  connected  with  the  history  of  this  mare  are  here 
given,  perhaps  in  unnecessary  detail,  but  as  Andrew  Jackson 
was  very  extensively  advertised  under  a  fraudulent  pedigree  from 
about  1834  till  the  time  of  his  death,  and  as  I  had  at  one  time 
accepted  it  as  true,  it  is  better  that  it  should  be  made  very  plain, 
especially  as  I  had  been  severely  criticised  for  changing  it.  The 
-correction  made,  as  above,  was  founded  on  information  received 
from  two  separate  and  distinct  sources  and  both  thoroughly  re- 
liable. The  fraudulent  pedigree  of  this  mare  represented  her  as 
*"by  Whynot,  son  of  imported  Messenger,  and  her  dam  by  Messen- 
ger" himself.  This  was  just  such  a  pedigree  as  so  great  a  horse 
should  have  had,  but  there  was  no  truth  in  it.  The  attack  was 
led  by  quite  a  large  breeder  in  one  of  the  prairie  States,  who  had 
.a  number  of  animals  remotely  descended  from  Andrew  Jackson. 
He  did  not  even  pretend  to  know  anything  at  all  about  the  truth 
of  the  matter,  but  simply  urged  most  vehemently  that  the  pedi- 
gree should  be  restored  because  it  was  old.  The  fact  of  the 
matter  was  the  man  wanted  the  old  lie  instead  of  the  new  truth 
maintained  because  it  would  help  to  sell  his  stock,  which  was  the 
very  object  for  which  the  lie  was  originally  invented. 

Daniel  Jeffreys  was  very  much  addicted  to  trotting  horses,  and 


324  THE    HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

when  he  bought  the  black  mare  that  was  then  carrying  Andrew 
Jackson  he  kept  her  for  his  own  driving  and  named  her  "Char- 
coal Sal."  She  was  no  doubt  among  the  fastest  of  the  road 
horses,  but  there  is  no  record  of  her  ever  being  in  a  race.  How 
much  Jeffreys  drove  Charcoal  Sal  that  autumn  cannot  now  be  deter- 
mined; probably  too  much  for  the  physical,  but  not  too  muck 
for  the  mental,  organization  of  the  foal  she  was  carrying. 

About  the  break  of  day,  one  morning  in  the  following  April,, 
somebody  was  passing  Jeffreys'  brickyard  (my  recollection  is, 
it  was  George  Woodruff  himself),  and  he  heard  a  splashing  in  the- 
water  accumulated  in  one  of  the  clay  pits,  and  Charcoal  Sal  cir- 
cling round  in  great  distress.  She  had  dropped  her  foal,  and  in. 
its  weak  efforts  to  get  on  its  feet,  it  had  rolled  into  the  pit.  It 
was  at  once  pulled  out  and  the  family  aroused,  and  no  time  was 
lost  in  rubbing  it  dry  and  wrapping  it  in  warm  blankets.  Some- 
of  the  mare's  milk  was  poured  into  it  from  time  to  time,  and  to- 
ward noon  it  was  so  much  revived  and  strengthened  as  to  mani- 
fest a  disposition  to  get  on  its  feet.  This  was  due,  principally, 
to  the  womanly  care  and  good  nursing  of  Mrs.  Jeffreys.  But, 
when  helped  up,  he  appeared  to  have  strength  enough  every- 
where but  in  his  pastern  joints,  and  there  he  had  no  strength  at 
all.  In  this  condition  the  colt  remained  a  day  or  two,  a  most 
pitiable  and  most  helpless  object,  standing  on  its  pasterns  instead 
of  its  feet.  One  morning  at  the  breakfast-table  Mr.  Jeffreys 
said  he  would  give  any  of  the  boys  a  dollar  if  he  would  put  that 
colt  out  of  misery  and  bury  it  out  of  his  sight.  Mrs.  Jeffreys, 
whose  womanly  feelings  and  sympathies  were  all  enlisted,  replied 
to  her  husband's  remark  that  "the  boy  who  would  kill  that  colt 
never  could  eat  another  mouthful  at  that  table."  What  a  grand 
exhibition  of  true  womanly  instincts!  Day  by  day  her  unremit- 
ting care  was  rewarded  by  seeing  a  little  more  strength  gather- 
ing in  the  weak  places,  and  at  last  her  kind,  motherly  heart  was 
gladdened  by  seeing  him  skip  and  play,  a  strong  beautiful  colt. 

Mr.  Jeffreys  kept  the  colt  till  he  was  some  five  or  six  years  old 
and  then  sold  him  to  John  Weaver,  whose  residence  was  about 
half  a  mile  from  the  old  Hunting  Park  Course.  He  remained 
the  property  of  Mr.  Weaver  till  he  died,  September  19,  1843.  In 
his  stud  services  he  was  kept  on  both  sides  of  the  Delaware,  in 
the  region  of  Philadelphia,  and  made  one  season,  perhaps  two,  on 
Long  Island.  As  a  trotter  he  stood  as  the  first  of  all  stallions  of 
his  day. 


THE   CLA1S   AND   BASHAW'S.  325 

His  first  race  took  place  October  19,  1832,  over  the  Hunting 
Park  Course  for  a  purse  of  two  hundred  dollars  for  green  horses, 
to  saddle.  He  was  entered  under  the  name  of  "Brickmaker," 
was  ridden  by  George  Woodruff  ("Uncle  George"),  and  beat 
Jersey  Fagdown,  son  of  Fagdown,  by  Messenger.  Time  6:30, 
6:23. 

The  next  year  he  beat  Jersey  Fagdown  again  for  the  same 
purse  and  over  the  same  course. 

October.  1834,  he  again  won  the  same  purse,  over  the  same 
course,  at  two  miles  to  saddle,  beating  Sally  Miller.  Time  5:26, 
5:25. 

The  next  October,  1835,  over  the  same  course,  the  same  con- 
ditions, he  beat  Lady  Warrenton,  by  Abdallah,  and  Daniel  D. 
Tompkins,  by  a  son  of  Winthrop  Messenger.  Time  5:20,  5:19. 

These  performances  have  been  extended  far  enough  to  give  a 
just  conception  of  his  speed  and  his  staying  qualities.  His  races 
seem  to  have  been  pretty  much  all  to  saddle  and  two-mile  heats. 
In  that  day  most  races  were  to  saddle.  George  Woodruff  told 
me  he  was  on  his  back  when  he  made  Edwin  Forrest  trot  in 
2:31^  to  win,  but  whether  it  was  in  a  race  or  a  trial  I  cannot  now 
recall.  Mr.  George  Woodruff  was  an  uncle  of  Hiram  Woodruff 
and  a  very  worthy  man.  To  him  I  am  indebted  for  all  the  de- 
tails of  the  early  life  of  Andrew  Jackson,  and  they  were  of  his 
own  personal  knowledge. 

KEMBLE  JACKSON. — About  the  year  1853,  of  all  the  idols  of 
the  trotting-horse  world,  perhaps  no  one  had  so  many  worship- 
ers as  Kemble  Jackson.  In  1852  he  was  beaten  by  O'Blennis, 
three-mile  heats  in  harness,  and  in  April,  1853,  he  was  beaten  by 
both  Green  Mountain  Maid  and  Lady  Vernon,  mile  heats  in  har- 
ness, but  in  June  following  he  achieved  a  great  triumph.  The 
race  was  on  the  Union  Course  and  there  was  a  vast  concourse  of 
people  there  to  see  it.  The  purse  and  stake  was  for  four  thou- 
sand dollars,  three-mile  heats  to  two  hundred  and  fifty-pound 
wagons.  The  interest  was  very  intense,  as  O'Blennis,  Boston 
Girl,  Pet,  lola  and  Honest  John  were  in  it.  Each  horse  in  the 
race  made  better  time  than  he  ever  made  before,  and  yet  Kemble 
Jackson  took  the  lead  and  maintained  it  from  end  to  end,  with- 
out a  skip  or  a  break.  After  the  first  heat  even,  the  friends  of 
O'Blennis  would  not  hedge  their  money,  for  they  had  faith  that 
the  gallant  son  of  Abdallah  would  win.  The  finish  of  the  second 
heat  was  in  the  order  above  given.  The  time  was  8:03,  8:04|. 


3^ti  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

Faster  time  has  since  been  made  to  wagon,  but  probably  not  with 
this  weight  and  at  this  distance.  As  a  weight-puller  for  three 
miles  I  believe  he  still  remains  the  champion.  He  was  a  very 
strongly  built  chestnut  horse,  arid  was  got  by  Andrew  Jackson 
the  last  year  of  his  life. 

The  pedigree  of  his  dam  was  in  confusion  for  a  long  time. 
Her  name  was  Fanny  Kemble.  There  were  a  number  of  run- 
ning-bred mares  named  after  that  very  popular  actress,  and  every- 
body who  had  anything  tracing  to  "Fanny  Kemble"  was  sure 
that  that  particular  mare  was  the  dam  of  Kemble  Jackson.  In  the 
first  volume  of  the  "Register"  he  is  given  as  out  of  Fanny  Kem- 
*ble  by  Sir  Archy,  and  in  the  second  volume  there  was  some  fairly 
good  evidence  that  he  was  out  of  Fanny  Kemble  by  Hunt's 
Eagle,  tracing  on  through  running  lines.  It  is  true  he  was  out 
of  a  mare  called  Fanny  Kemble,  but  neither  of  the  two  foregoing. 
Her  blood  was  wholly  unknown.  The  Hon.  Ely  Moore  was  a 
member  of  Congress,  and  when  on  his  way  to  Washington  in  1839 
he  saw  a  very  fine,  stout-looking  mare  hitched  to  a  gig  in  the 
city  of  Baltimore.  She  was  a  chestnut  and  showed  such  ability 
to  handle  a  great  heavy  gig  with  ease  and  rapidity  that  he  bought 
her.  He  bought  her  for  what  she  was  herself  and  not  for  what 
her  blood  was.  There  was  no  evidence  asked  or  given  as  to  how 
she  was  bred.  This  mare  produced  several  foals  to  Andrew 
Jackson,  the  youngest  of  which  was  Kemble  Jackson.  While  he 
was  still  a  colt,  Mr.  Moore  presented  him  to  his  son-in  law,  G. 
U.  Reynolds,  who  still  owned  him  when  he  died.  Mr.  Reynolds 
is  an  intelligent  and  very  reputable  man,  and  this  is  the  history 
of  the  origin  of  Kemble  Jackson  as  given  to  me  in  person  by 
him.  Mr.  Moore  paid  two  hundred  and  fifty  dollars  for  this 
mare  Fanny  Kemble,  and  she  was  so  handsome  and  so  fast  on  the 
road  that  he  considered  her  a  very  cheap  mare.  The  company 
never  was  too  hot  nor  the  road  too  long  for  her. 

Everybody  has  heard  of  "The  Kemble  Jackson  Check"  and 
nearly  everybody,  until  within  the  last  few  years  at  least,  has 
been  using*  it  without  knowing  just  why  or  when  it  can 
be  used  with  advantage.  When  in  the  hands  of  Hiram  Wood- 
ruff, Kemble  Jackson  got  into  the  habit  of  bringing  his  chin  back 
against  his  breast,  and  in  that  shape  Hiram  could  pull  on  him  all 
day  without  getting  control  of  him.  In  this  dilemma,  Mr. 
Reynolds  suggested  an  overdraw  check  which  might  prevent  the- 
indulgence  of  this  bad  habit.  Hiram  took  the  suggestion,  had 


THE    CLAYS   AND    BASHAWS.  327 

one  made,  and  it  was  a  success,  in  his  case.  In  twenty-four  days 
after  the  performance  which  made  him  a  great  name  from  one 
end  of  the  land  to  the  other  he  died  of  rupture.  As  he  was  only 
nine  years  old  and  as  he  was  just  beginning  to  be  appreciated  as 
a  stallion  the  breeders  of  the  country  sustained  a  great  loss.  Up 
to  this  point  in  his  history  he  had  no  reputation,  had  been  little 
patronized  and  left  but  *3W  of  his  progeny  to  perpetuate  his 
name. 

LONG  ISLAND  BLACK.  HAWK. — This  sou  of  Andrew  Jackson 
was  foaled  1837  and  his  dam  was  the  distinguished  trotter  Sally 
Miller,  by  Tippoo  Saib,  son  of  Tippoo  Saib  by  imported  Messen- 
ger. This  mare  was  bred  in  Bucks  County,  Pennsylvania,  and 
trotted  as  a  three-year-old  in  1828  on  the  Hunting  Park  Course, 
Philadelphia.  She  was  distinguished  in  her  day,  beating  many 
of  the  best,  and  was  the  first  three-year-old  trotter  of  which  we 
have  any  account.  She  was  finally  owned  on  Long  Island,  but  I 
have  never  been  able  to  learn  the  name  of  her  owner.  Black 
Hawk  trotted  some  famous  races  on  Long  Island,  the  most  noted 
of  which,  perhaps,  was  his  match  with  Jenny  Lind  in  which  he 
was  to  pull  a  two  hundred  and  fifty-pound  wagon,  and  the  mare 
the  usual  weight.  In  this  match  he  beat  her  in  straight  heats. 
Time  2:40,  2:38,  2:43.  In  1849  he  beat  Cassius  M.  Clay,  time 
2:41,  2:38,  2:41.  This  horse  was  owned  for  a  time  by  Jonas 
Hoover,  of  Germantown,  Columbia  County,  New  York,  and  was 
there  called  Andrew  Jackson  Jr.,  or  Young  Andrew  Jackson. 
He  made  some  seasons  in  Orange  County,  and  died  at  Mont- 
gomery in  that  county  July,  1850.  His  progeny  were  not 
numerous  and  but  two  of  them  from  his  own  loins  entered  the 
2:30  list.  His  son  Jupiter  put  five  in  the  2:30  list;  Andrew 
Jackson  Jr.,  two;  Mohawk,  three;  Nonpareil,  two;  Plow  Boy, 
one;  and  VernoPs  Black  Hawk,  one;  to  which  we  may  add  the 
fact  that  this  last  named  was  the  sire  of  the  famous  Iowa  stal- 
lion, Green's  Bashaw.  Although  his  life  was  not  long  and  his 
stud  career  was  probably  up  to  the  average,  it  cannot  be  said  that 
he  was  a  great  progenitor  of  trotters. 

HENRY  CLAY,  the  nominal  head  of  the  tribe  that  has  taken 
his  name,  was  a  black  horse,  foaled  1837,  got  by  Andrew  Jackson, 
son  of  Young  Bashaw;  and  his  dam  was  Surrey,  or  Lady  Surrey, 
as  she  is  sometimes  called,  a  pacing  mare  that  was  brought  from 
Surrey,  New  Hampshire,  to  New  York,  and  was  converted  to  a 
trotter,  or  possibly  she  may  have  been  double-gaited  from  her 


328  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

birth.  It  has  been  generally  stated  in  years  past  that  this  mare 
was  brought  from  Canada,  and  as  there  have  been  many  dis- 
putes about  her  origin,  I  will  try  to  give  what  authentic  knowl- 
edge we  have  concerning  her. 

Mr.  Peter  W.  Jones,  one  of  the  "old-time"  horsemen  and  a 
very  reliable  man,  said  that  David  W.  Gilmore,  formerly  a  grocer 
at  City  Hall  Place  and  Pearl  Street,  New  York,  bought  a  pacing 
mare,  five  years  old,  of  Mark  D.  Perkins,  of  Mount  Vernon,  New 
Hampshire,  which  came  from  Surrey,  New  Hampshire,  and  hence 
her  name  "Lady  Surrey."  G-ilmore  rode  her  to  New  York,  with  a 
young  man  named  Lovejoy.  He  gave  less  than  one  hundred 
dollars  for  her.  She  was  a  superior  saddle  mare,  and  as  Mr.  Gil- 
more  appreciated  horseback  riding  he  bought  her  for  that  purpose. 
Frank  Gilmore,  who  was  a  deputy  sheriff  under  Sheriff  Orser,  of 
New  York,  said  that  Lady  Surrey  was  the  mare  his  brother  rode 
from  -New  Hampshire,  and  after  he  sold  her  she  turned  out  to 
be  a  trotter. 

This  is  the  story  as  told  by  Mr.  Jones,  and  judging  from  its 
source  I  have  no  doubt  it  is  substantially  correct.  This  leaves  us 
without  any  knowledge  whatever  of  the  blood  of  the  mare,  but 
only  that  she  was  both  a  pacer  and  a  trotter.  She  was  engaged  in 
some  races  and  was  quite  well  known  to  the  trotting  men  of  that 
day,  and  she  must  have  been  a  pretty  good  one  to  have  been 
owned  by  such  a  horseman  as  George  M.  Patchen  and  by  him 
bred  to  Andrew  Jackson.  It  is  said  Surrey  and  Sally  Miller  were 
coupled  with  Andrew  Jackson  the  same  day;  they  both  stood, 
and  the  one  produced  Henry  Clay  and  the  other  Long  Island 
Black  Hawk. 

While  Henry  Clay  remained  the  property  of  his  breeder  he  was 
trained  and  was  looked  upon  as  a  promising  young  horse,  but  I 
have  not  been  able  to  determine  what  rate  of  speed  he  was  able 
to  show.  He  certainly  did  not  stand  anywhere  near  the  fastest, 
and  he  does  not  appear  to  have  ever  won  a  race,  and  perhaps 
never  started  in  one.  Still,  he  was  esteemed  as  one  of  the  best 
horses  on  Long  Island  and  was  liberally  supported  while  there. 
When  about  eight  years  old  he  was  sold  for  a  fine  price  to  Gen- 
eral Wadsworth,  of  Livingston  County,  New  York,  and  he  was 
kept  at  various  points  in  that  part  of  the  State  till  he  died  of  old 
age  and  neglect  in  1867.  He  came  into  the  world  when  trotters 
were  few  and  he  lived  till  they  were  many.  He  left  a  numerous 
progeny,  but  as  the  sire  of  trotters  he  was  a  pronounced  failure. 


THE   CLAYS   AXD    BASHAWS.  329 

In  examining  the  2:30  list  I  find  a  single  one  of  his  get,  before 
he  left  Long  Island,  with  a  single  heat  of  even  2:30.  And  in 
examining  the  list  of  his  get  during  the  twenty-odd  years  of  his 
life  in  Western  New  York,  I  find  a  single  representative,  with 
a  single  heat  in  even  2:30,  and  this  one  was  out  of  a  mare  by  old 
Champion,  a  very  noted  trotting  progenitor.  He  left  three  sons 
that  appear  as  sires:  Andy  Johnson,  with  three  just  inside  of  the 
2:30  list,  Henry  Clay  Jr.,  with  a  single  one  to  his  credit,  and 
Cassius  M.  Clay,  with  one  very  fast  one  to  his  credit.  This 
Cassius  M.  Clay  was  the  sire  of  the  famous  George  M.  Patchen. 
Three  of  Henry  Clay's  daughters  produced  six  2:30  trotters,  and 
for  a  time  it  was  held  that  the  dam  of  the  very  famous  George 
Wilkes  was  a  daughter  of  his,  but  that  claim  has  not  been  sus- 
tained by  later  developments. 

The  name  and  memory  of  the  horse  Henry  Clay  would  have 
been  perpetuated  in  horse  history  through  an  attenuated  line  of 
descendants,  as  a  fairly  good  horse,  though  unsuccessful  as  a  trot- 
ting progenitor,  had  his  bones  been  left  to  rest  and  rot  where 
they  were  buried.  Unfortunately,  about  the  time  of  his  death, 
there  sprang  up  a  most  voluble  enthusiast  whose  special  mission 
on  earth  seemed  to  be  to  extol  the  superlative  greatness  of  Henry 
Clay,  and  the  contemptible  worthlessness  of  "Bill  Rysdyk's  bull," 
as  he  designated  Hambletonian.  He  commenced  pouring  his  end- 
less contributions  into  the  columns  of  the  breeding  press  and 
writing  interminable  letters  to  as  many  prominent  breeders  as 
would  receive  them,  and  all  about  the  Clay  blood  being  the  only 
blood  from  which  the  trotter  could  be  bred.  These  effusions 
were  written  with  some  skill,  abounding  in  great  prodigality  of 
fancy  and  still  greater  economy  of  truth.  It  was  astonishing 
how  many  men  believed  what  he  said  and  how  few  understood 
that  the  "old  man"  was  in  it  as  a  "business."  He  had  gathered  up 
all  the  cheap  sons  of  the  old  horse  and  wanted  to  sell  them  at  a 
handsome  advance,  and  for  a  time  the  game  won. 

To  keep  the  interest  from  falling  off  and  the  Clay  blood  mov- 
ing, he  secured  access  to  the  purses  of  two  wealthy  gentlemen 
who  were  possessors  and  admirers  of  Clay  blood,  and  the  bones 
of  the  horse  were  taken  up,  mounted  and  set  up,  and  presented 
to  the  United  States  National  Museum  at  Washington,  D.  C. 
The  bones  are  still  there,  and  the  inscription  on  the  pedestal 
when  last  seen  was  as  follows: 


330  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

"  The  progenitor  of  the  entire  family  of  Clay 

Horses,  and  the  foundation  of  the 

American  Trotting  Horse." 

Then  follow  the  names  of  the  two  gentlemen  who  presented 
the  bones  to  the  Museum,  but  as  a  kindness  to  them  their  names 
are  omitted.  The  first  clause  of  the  inscription  is  true,  but 
the  second  is  not  true,  and  I  very  seriously  doubt  whether  they 
ever  authorized  the  second  clause.  Henry  Clay  was  not  the 
"foundation"  of  anything,  except  the  airy  fabric  of  a  fortune  for 
our  enthusiast.  The  scheme  as  an  advertising  dodge  was  well 
worked,  and  the  schemer  could  well  exclaim,  "Where  now  is  Bill 
Kysdyk's  bull?"  In  the  nature  of  things  such  shams  cannot  last; 
this  one  had  its  fleeting  day,  and  in  the  end  the  sheriff  sold  its 
worthless  accumulations. 

CASSIUS  M.  CLAY. — This  son  of  Henry  Clay  was  quite  a  large 
bay  horse,  taking  his  color  and  much  of  his  shape  from 
his  dam.  He  was  foaled  1843,  and  his  dam,  Jersey  Kate, 
was  the  dam  of  the  trotting  horse  John  Anderson.  Jersey 
Kate  was  a  bay,  about  fifteen  hands  three  inches  high,  with 
a  clean,  bony  head,  long  neck,  well  set  up,  and  when  in  driv- 
ing condition  was  a  little  high  on  her  legs.  She  was  used  in 
livery  work,  and  when  a  good  and  fast  driver  was  wanted,  Jersey 
Kate  was  always  in  demand.  In  the  same  stable  a  pair  of 
"Canuck"  ponies  were  kept  that  were  driven  in  a  delivery  wagon. 
They  were  duns  with  white  manes  and  tails  and  about  fourteen 
and  one-half  hands  high,  quick  steppers  with  no  speed.  One  of 
them  slipped  his  halter  one  night  and  got  Jersev  Kate  with  foal. 
While  she  was  carrying  this  foal  she  became  the  property  of  Mr. 
Z.  B.  Van  Wyck's  father,  and  when  she  had  dropped  her  colt  and 
was  put  to  farm  work  it  was  found  that  she  was  too  rapid  and 
spirited  for  his  other  horses,  and  he  sold  her  to  Joseph  Oliver,  of 
Brooklyn.  The  colt  she  dropped  was  weaned  before  the  sale  of 
the  dam  and  remained  in  the  family  till  he  grew  up.  He  was  a 
grey,  a  little  below  fifteen  hands,  and  as  the  boy,  Z.  B.  Van  Wyck, 
had  broken  and  ridden  him  he  got  it  into  his  head  that  he  would 
make  a  trotter,  so  he  bought  him  from  his  father  for  eighty  dol- 
lars. He  continued  to  improve  and  he  sold  him  to  Timothy  T. 
Jackson  and  he  to  Charles  Carman,  who  trotted  him  in  many 
races.  When  Mr.  Oliver,  then  owner  of  Jersey  Kate,  saw  her 
"catch"  colt  by  a  "Canuck"  pony  able  to  beat  many  of  the 
good  ones  on  the  island,  he  concluded  to  breed  her  to  Mr. 


THE   CLAYS   AND   BASHAWS.  331 

Patchen's  horse,  Henry  Clay,  and  the  produce  was  Cassius  M. 
Clay.  From  her  appearance,  form,  and  especially  her  action,  it 
was  the  universal  opinion  she  was  by  Mambrino,  son  of  Messen- 
ger, and  it  is  probable  she  was,  but  in  the  absence  of  proof  she 
must  be  classed  as  "breeding  unknown."  Had  it  not  been  for 
the  speed  of  little  John  Anderson,  there  would  not  have  been 
any  Cassius  M.  Clay. 

When  the  colt  grew  up,  Mr.  Oliver,  his  breeder,  sold  him  to 
Mr.  George  M.  Patchen,  of  Brooklyn,  and  he  became  a  very  popu- 
lar stallion.  After  the  death  of  Kemble  Jackson  and  Long 
Island  Black  Hawk  he  was  considered  the  best  trotting  stallion 
on  Long  Island.  He  was  in  a  good  many  races,  some  of  which 
were  reported,  but  more  that  were  not,  and  as  against  stallions, 
he  was  with  the  fastest.  In  temper  he  was  disposed  to  be  vicious 
and  had  to  be  watched.  In  form  he  could  not  be  considered 
beautiful,  but  powerful.  When  the  artist  was  modeling  the 
equestrian  statue  of  Washington  that  stands  in  Union  Square, 
he  had  a  great  search  for  a  horse  to  serve  as  a  model,  and  he 
selected  Cassius  M.  Clay  as  the  best  representative  of  majesty 
and  power  that  he  could  find.  Although  the  bronze  is  of  heroic 
size,  it  is,  no  doubt,  a  fair  representation  of  the  outline  and 
structure  of  the  horse.  He  died  at  Montgomery,  Orange  County, 
New  York,  July,  1854,  in  the  same  stable  where  Long  Island 
Black  Hawk  had  died  four  years  before.  The  three  great  horses, 
Long  Island  Black  Hawk,  Kemble  Jackson  and  Cassius  M.  Clay, 
died  just  as  they  entered  on  what  should  have  been  the  period  of 
their  greatest  usefulness,  the  first  at  the  age  of  thirteen;  the 
second  at  the  age  of  nine;  and  the  third  at  the  age  of  eleven.  If 
these  horses  had  lived  through  the  usual  period  of  horse  life, 
doubtless  the  records  of  performers  would  bear  very  different 
relations  from  what  they  do  to-day,  but  the  really  great  sire  had 
not  yet  made  his  appearance. 

Considering  the  short  period  Cassius  M.  Clay  was  in  the  stud 
he  left  a  numerous  progeny,  but  only  one  of  them,  George  M. 
Patchen,  achieved  greatness  on  the  turf.  He  placed  thirty-four 
heats  in  2:30  or  better  to  his  credit  and  made  a  record  of  2:23% 
in  1860,  which  was  the  fastest  for  any  stallion  of  his  day.  This 
was  the  only  one  in  the  2:30  list  from  the  loins  of  Cassius  M. 
Clay.  Nine  of  his  sons  became  the  sires  of  eighteen  trotters, 
-and  more  than  a  dozen  of  his  sons  were  named  "Cassius  M.  Clay 


332  THE    HOUSE    OF   AMEKICA. 

Jr.,"  thus  leading  to  great  confusion  and  oftentimes  uncertainty 
as  to  identity. 

CASSIUS  M.  CLAY  JR.  (NEAVE'S). — This  was  a  brown  horse 
foaled  1848,  got  by  Cassius  M.  Clay;  dam  by  Chancellor,  son  of 
Mambrino;  grandam  by  Engineer,  sire  of  Lady  Suffolk.  He  was 
bred  by  Charles  Mitchell,  of  Manhasset,  Long  Island,  owned  by 
Joseph  Godwin,  New  York;  stood  in  Orange  County,  1852,  in 
Dutchess,  1853,  and  was  taken  to  Cincinnati  that  fall.  He  was 
owned  by  Mr.  Neave,  made  a  few  seasons,  broke  his  leg  in  the 
hands  of  Mr.  McKelvy,  and  had  to  be  destroyed.  Mr.  Godwin 
represented  this  horse  to  me  as  very  fast  until  four  years  old, 
when  by  an  accident  he  was  thrown  into  the  Harlem  River  when 
hot  and  was  stiff  ever  afterward.  He  put  four  of  his  get  into 
the  2:30  list,  and  four  of  his  sons  got  ten  trotters  and  one  pacer. 
His  early  death  was  esteemed  a  great  loss,  for  he  was  better  bred 
than  most  of  the  other  sons  of  his  sire. 

CLAY  PILOT,  by  Cassius  M.  Clay  (Neave's),  was  out  of  a  catch 
filly,  whose  dam  was  the  famous  Kate,  the  grandam  of  Almont. 
From  the  noted  old  trotting  mare  Belle  of  Wabash,  whose  his- 
tory will  be  found  in  Chapter  XXX.  on  the  investigation  of  pedi- 
grees, Clay  Pilot  got  The  Moor,  himself  a  fast  trotter  and  a  suc- 
cessful sire.  He  died  at  ten  years  old,  leaving  among  others  the 
famous  Beautiful  Bells,  2:29^,  that,  mated  with  Electioneer,  pro- 
duced a  remarkable  family;  and  Sultan,  2:24,  sire  of  the  great 
Stamboul,  2:07^,  and  of  thirty-eight  other  performers,  and  of 
thirteen  producing  sons  and  twenty  producing  daughters.  The 
Moor  founded  an  excellent  family. 

From  a  sister  to  Crabtree  Bellfounder,  by  imported  Bell- 
founder,  Neave's  Cassius  M.  Clay  got  the  black  stallion  Harry 
Clay,  2:29,  that  was  quite  a  reputable  trotter  in  his  day,  and  left 
five  standard  performers,  sixteen  producing  sons  and  twenty- 
three  producing  daughters,  among  the  latter  the  famous  Green 
Mountain  Maid,  the  dam  of  Electioneer. 

CASSIUS  M.  CLAY  JR.  (STRADER'S). — This  was  a  handsome 
brown  horse,  foaled  1852,  by  the  original  Cassius,  and  his  dam  was 
a  black  mare  by  Abdallah,  that  passed  through  the  hands  of  A. 
Van  Cortlandt  and  afterward  became  the  property  of  Joseph 
Godwin;  grandam  by  Lawrence's  Eclipse;  great-grandam  the 
Charles  Hadley  mare  by  imported  Messenger.  This  pedigree 
has  been  questioned  without  assigning  any  reasons  or  facts,  but 
as  it  came  to  me  circumstantially  and  from  unquestionable  sources:. 


THE   CLAYS   AND   BASHAWS.  333 

I  have  no  reason  to  doubt  it.  He  was  bred  by  Joseph  H.  God- 
win, of  New  York,  and  foaled  the  property  of  Dr.  Spaulding,  of 
{rreenupsburg,  Kentucky.  He  made  some  seasons  in  the  hands 
of  Dr.  Herr,  of  Lexington,  Kentucky,  was  bought  1868  by  R.  S. 
Strader,  and  passed  to  General  W.  T.  Withers,  of  Lexington, 
where  he  died  1882.  He  was  engaged  in  several  races  and  made 
a  record  of  2:35^.  He  put  four  in  the  2:30  list,  and  he  left  six- 
teen sons  that  were  the  sires  of  forty-six  trotters  and  seven 
pacers.  His  daughters  have  produced  well,  thirty -four  of  them 
having  produced  forty-two  trotters  and  seven  pacers.  This 
shows  him  to  have  been  a  better  horse  than  his  sire  and  better 
than  any  of  the  other  sons  of  his  sire. 

GEORGE  M.  PATCHED  was  a  large  bay  horse,  fully  sixteen  hands 
high  and  heavily  proportioned.  He  was  bred  by  H.  F.  Sickles, 
Monmouth  County,  New  Jersey,  for  Richard  F.  Carman,  of  New 
York,  the  owner  of  his  dam.  He  was  got  by  the  original  Cas- 
sius  M.  Clay,  and  his  dam  was  a  light  chestnut  mare,  owned  and 
driven  on  the  road  by  Mr.  Carman.  As  the  blood  and  origin  of 
this  mare  was  for  many  years  unknown,  it  is  necessary  to  go  into 
some  particulars  concerning  it.  From  1835  two  brothers, 
Thomas  and  Richard  Tone,  were  contractors  on  the  streets  in  the 
northern  part  of  New  York  City.  Two  or  three  years  afterward 
Richard  bought  or  traded  for  a  large,  strong  sorrel  mare  to  work 
in  one  of  their  dirt  carts.  It  was  represented  that  she  had  lost  a 
foal  shortly  before  and  she  was  thin  in  flesh  and  looked  coarse. 
When  she  moved  out  of  a  walk  she  always  went  into  a  pace,  and  that 
seemed  to  be  her  natural  gait.  They  kept  this  mare  at  work  in 
the  cart  for  several  years  and  sometimes  turned  her  out  to  pas- 
ture in  a  small  field  at  the  foot  of  "Break-neck"  hill,  adjoining 
a  pasture  owned  by  the  Bradhurst  family.  One  morning  a  two- 
year-old  stallion  colt,  owned  by  Samuel  Bradhurst,  was  found  in 
the  pasture  with  the  big  pacing  mare.  He  had  broken  down  the 
fence  between  the  two  pastures  and  gotten  the  big  mare  with 
foal.  In  due  time  she  dropped  a  light  chestnut  filly,  and  when 
weaned,  Thomas  Tone  bought  this  filly  from  his  brother  Richard, 
and  at  two  years  old  commenced  working  her  to  his  wagon.  She 
had  very  severe  treatment  for  so  young  an  animal  and  went  amiss, 
when  Thomas  sold  her  to  James  Scanlon,  a  blacksmith,  and  after 
a  time  he  sold  her  to  Richard  F.  Carman  for  a  driving  mare. 
Like  her  dam,  when  she  started  off  she  would  pace,  but  after 
going  some  distance  she  would  strike  a  trot  and  go  very  fast. 


334  THE   HOESE   OF   AMEEICA. 

Mr.  Carman  paid  one  hundred  dollars  for  her  and  he  drove  her 
beside  another  that  he  paid  fifteen  hundred  for,  and  his  fast  daily 
drives  from  Carmanville  down  to  the  city  soon  tested  the  respec- 
tive merits  of  the  two  mares.  The  hundred-dollar  mare  could 
outlast  the  other  and  had  to  help  her  along  toward  the  end  of 
the  drive.  In  time  she  was  foundered  and  permanently  stiffened 
and  that  was  the  reason  she  was  sent  to  Mr.  Sickles  to  be  bred. 

We  must  now  look  after  the  two-year-old  colt  that  was  the  sire 
of  this  mare.  Robert  L.  Stevens,  of  Hoboken,  owned  the  famous 
race  mare,  Betsey  Ransom,  and  with  others  he  bred  from  her 
the  two  fillies,  Itasca  and  Frolic.  In  1837  these  two  mares  were 
owned  by  Samuel  Bradhurst,  who  manifested  a  sporting  disposi- 
tion, very  much  against  the  wishes  of  his  father.  In  1837  he 
bred  these  two  mares  to  imported  Trustee,  then  standing  at 
Union  Course,  Long  Island,  and  the  produce  were  Head'em 
and  Fanny  Ransom.  It  is  not  known  what  became  of  Fanny 
Ransom,  but  he  continued  to  own  Head'em  for  some  years  and 
ran  him  in  1841  at  the  Union  Course  and  beat  the  imported  colt 
Baronet,  by  Spencer.  There  seems  to  be  no  other  trace  of  his 
running  or  his  stud  services.  It  was  in  1840,  therefore,  that  he 
jumped  the  fence  and  in  1841  that  the  dam  of  George  M.  Patchen 
was  foaled.  George  Canavan,  Mr.  Bradhurst's  coachman, 
says  there  were  no  other  foals  of  any  description  bred  by  Mr. 
Bradhurst.  These  facts  were  gleaned  personally  and  separately 
from  Tone  and  Canavan,  and  as  they  complement  and  sustain 
each  other,  they  must  be  accepted  as  the  best  information  extant 
on  the  breeding  of  this  great  horse.  His  dam  was  by  Head'em, 
a  son  of  Trustee,  out  of  a  mare  by  American  Eclipse,  a  grandson 
of  Messenger,  and  she  was  a  pacer  and  a  trotter.  His  grandam 
was  a  pacer  of  unknown  breeding. 

In  1851  he  was  purchased  for  four  hundred  dollars  from  Mr. 
Sickles  by  John  Buckley,  of  Bordentown,  New  Jersey,  and  a  few 
months  afterward  he  sold  a  half  interest  in  him  to  Dr.  Long- 
street,  of  the  same  place,  and  he  remained  their  joint  property  till 
1858,  when  Mr.  Buckley  sold  his  half  interest  to  Mr.  Joseph  Hall, 
of  Rochester,  New  York.  He  commenced  his  remarkable  career 
on  the  turf  in  1855  and  it  continued  till  1863.  In  1858  he  was 
engaged  in  the  first  race  that  gave  him  a  national  reputation. 
This  was  against  no  less  a  celebrity  than  Ethan  Allen,  and  he  was 
distanced,  leaving  Ethan  with  a  clear  title  to  the  stallion  cham- 
pionship. In  1860  he  turned  the  tables  on  his  old  rival  and  beat 


THE   CLAYS   AND   BASHAWS.  335 

him  in  straight  heats  in  2:25,  2:24,  2:29.  The  next  week  the 
contest  was  renewed  and  Patchen  again  won  in  straight  heats, 
and  this  gave  him  the  unchallenged  right  to  the  rank  of  the  fast- 
est trotting  stallion  in  the  world.  His  triumphs,  however,  were 
as  wide  as  the  trotting  turf  and  not  limited  to  sex.  He  was  able 
to  beat  and  did  beat  all  the  best  but  the  indomitable  little  Flora 
Temple,  and  although  he  beat  her  twice,  she  was  too  fast  for  him 
and  beat  him  many  times.  It  is  not  my  purpose  to  give  a  history 
of  his  achievements.  It  is  sufficient  to  say  he  made  a  record  of 
2:23£,  with  thirty-four  heats  to  his  credit  in  2:30  and  less,  and 
two  miles  in  4:51^. 

It  cannot  be  said  that  he  was  a  very  great  success  in  the  stud 
as  we  now  measure  success.  Four  of  his  get  were  able  to  enter 
the  2:30  list,  and  among  them  was  the  great  Lucy,  with  her 
record  of  2:18£.  Fifteen  of  his  sons  became  the  sires  of  sixty- 
two  trotters  and  three  pacers,  and  four  of  his  daughters  produced 
five  trotters.  It  is  hardly  fair  to  compare  the  stud  services  of  a 
horse  of  Patchen's  generation  with  many  of  the  great  sons  of 
Hambletonian,  but  at  the  same  time  we  must  not  forget  that 
Patchen  was  foaled  the  same  year  as  Hambletonian.  On  the 
first  of  May,  1864,  when  Dan  Pfifer  was  preparing  him  for  the 
racing  season  then  about  to  open,  he  died  of  a  rupture,  just  as 
his  sire  had  died. 

GEORGE  M.  PATCHED  JR.  (California  Patchen)  was  a  bay 
horse  by  the  foregoing;  dam  Belle  by  Top  Bellfounder,  a  grand- 
son of  imported  Bellfounder,  of  which  little  is  known.  He  was 
bred  by  Joseph  Eegan,  Mount  Holly,  New  Jersey,  and  taken  to 
California  1862  by  William  Hendrickson;  returned  to  New  York 
1866,  sold  to  Messrs.  Halstead,  Poughkeepsie,  1867,  and  by  them 
to  W.  A.  Matthews  in  1869,  and  taken  to  San  Jose,  California; 
then  sold  to  P.  A.  Finnegan,  of  San  Francisco,  and  died  the 
property  of  J.  B.  Haggin,  Sacramento,  1887.  He  was  cam- 
paigned quite  extensively  during  the  years  1866  and  1867  in 
the  East,  and  carried  away  a  good  share  of  the  winnings  from 
the  best.  His  best  record  was  2:27.  In  the  stud  he  was  more 
successful  than  his  sire,  which  may  be  accounted  for  by  his  more 
numerous  progeny  and  his  longer  life.  From  his  own  loins  he 
put  ten  trotters  into  the  2:30  list,  and,  although  there  was  no 
Lucy  among  them,  Wells  Fargo  made  a  record  of  2:18|;  Sam 
Purdy,  2:20|;  Vanderlyn,  2:21,  etc.,  showing  a  better  average 
than  the  get  of  his  sire.  Ten  of  his  sons  got  twenty-three  trotters 


336  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

and  two  pacers,  and  eleven  of  his  daughters  produced  twenty- 
five  trotters  and  three  pacers. 

Several  of  the  other  sons  of  George  M.  Patchen  left  valuable 
and  fast  trotting  progeny,  and  among  them  I  will  name  Godfrey 
Patchen,  with  nine  trotters  to  his  credit  and  his  descendants 
breeding  on;  Henry  B.  Patchen,  with  seven  to  his  credit;  Seneca 
Patchen,  with  sixteen  trotters  and  one  pacer  to  his  credit,  per- 
haps more  than  he  is  honestly  entitled  to;  Wild  Wagoner,  with 
four  to  his  credit;  and  Tom  Patchen  with  three  and  his  family 
transmitting  speed. 

In  considering  the  founders  of  the  Clay  family,  there  are  two 
or  three  important  facts  that  should  be  kept  in  view,  bearing 
upon  the  growth,  or  the  decadence  of  the  family.  In  a  breeding 
sense  this  appears  to  be  the  longest  line  of  developed  speed  that 
we  have  in  any  of  our  trotting  families.  While  we  know  that 
there  were  developed  trotters  and  pacers  many  years  before 
Abdallah  and  Andrew  Jackson  were  foaled,  we  are  not  able  to 
connect  them  in  lines  of  descent,  generation  after  generation. 
As  Andrew  Jackson  with  his  developed  speed  stands  at  the  head 
of  this  line,  the  question  naturally  arises,  Where  did  he  get  his 
ability  to  trot?  The  only  answer  we  can  give  is,  from  the 
daughter  of  Messenger  that  was  the  grandam  of  his  sire,  and 
from  the  fast  pacer,  Charcoal  Sal,  that  produced  him.  Even  if 
we  accept  the  pedigree  of  Young  Bashaw,  with  his  Messenger 
grandam,  when  we  get  to  Andrew  Jackson  we  are  a  long  way 
from  the  Messenger  source  of  trotting  speed;  hence,  we  must 
look  to  the  pacing  speed  of  his  dam — Charcoal  Sal  from  Ohio — as 
the  more  probable  source. 

Andrew  Jackson  was  bred  upon  the  converted  pacer  Surrey, 
and  produced  Henry  Clay,  then  Henry  Clay  was  bred  upon 
Jersey  Kate,  of  unknown  blood,  but  a  producer  of  trotting 
speed,  and  produced  Cassius  M.  Clay.  Then  Cassius  M.  Clay 
was  bred  upon  a  mare  "full  of  Messenger  blood"  and  pro- 
duced Strader's  Cassius  M.  Clay — the  best  of  the  Clay  name 
by  the  record.  Cassius  M.  Clay  (the  original)  was  also  bred  on 
"Dick  Carman's  mare"  and  produced  the  famous  George  M. 
Patchen.  This  Carman  mare  was  by  a  running-bred  son  of 
Trustee.  She  was  both  a  pacer  and  a  trotter  and  her  dam  was  a 
natural  pacer.  George  M.  Patchen  was  bred  on  the  Regan  mare 
and  produced  California  Patchen.  This  mare  was,  practically, 
of  unknown  breeding.  California  Patchen  was  bred  on  Whiskey 


THE    CLAYS    AND    BASHAWS.  337 

Jane  and  the  produce  was  his  best  son,  Sam  Purdy.  This  mare 
Whiskey  Jane  was  quite  a  trotter  and,she  was  undoubtedly  pacing 
bred,  but  I  will  not  here  enter  into  the  details  of  her  origin. 

We  have  here  before  us  a  condensed  view  of  the  trotting  in- 
heritance of  the  Clay  and  the  Patchen  families  from  Andrew 
Jackson  to  Sam  Purdy,  and  its  most  remarkable  feature  is  its 
poverty  in  recognized  trotting  blood.  On  the  maternal  side,  the 
pacing  habit  of  action  seems  to  prevail  in  almost  every  succeed- 
ing generation.  The  second  thought  is  that  the  tribe  has  not 
held  its  vantage  ground  of  the  first  and  the  longest  line  of  de- 
veloped trotting  speed.  The  third  is  that  it  has  failed  to  trans- 
mit speed  with  uniformity,  but  rather  sporadically.  This  may 
be  accounted  for  by  the  general  character  and  uncertainty  of  the 
maternal  side,  and  suggests  the  question  whether  animals  so  bred 
can  be  relied  upon  to  transmit  with  uniformity  an  inherit- 
ance received  sporadically.  From  its  place  in  the  first  rank  as  to 
time  and  popularity,  this  family  has  not  been  able  to  hold  its 
own  and  it  has  declined  to  a  place  among  the  minor  families  of 
-trotters  and  bids  fair  to  be  absorbed  by  tribes  of  stronger  trotting 
inheritance. 


CHAPTER  XXV. 

AMERICAN   STAR,    PILOT,    CHAMPION,    AND   NORMAN   FAMILIES. 

Seely's  American  Star — His  fictitious  pedigree — Breeding  really  unknown — A 
trotter  of  some  merit — His  stud  career — His  daughters  noted  brood  mares — 
Conklin's  American  Star — Old  Pacing  Pilot — History  and  probable  origin 
— Pilot  Jr. — Pedigree — Training  and  races — Prepotency — Family  statistics 
summarized— Grinnell's  Champion,  son  of  Almack — His  sons  and  perform- 
ing descendants — Alexander's  Norman  and  his  sire,  the  Morse  Horse — 
Swigert  and  Blackwood. 

OF  all  the  hundreds  of  difficult  and  obscure  pedigrees  that  I 
have  undertaken  to  investigate  and  straighten  out,  I  have  given 
more  time,  labor  and  money  to  that  of  Seely's  American  Star 
than  to  any  other  horse.  In  1867  I  got  his  pedigree  from  a  gen- 
tleman in  Morris  County,  New  Jersey,  who  claimed  to  have  bred 
him,  and  this  pedigree  and  the  history  accompanying  it  embracing 
several  details  that  were  interesting,  I  published  it,  at  full 
length,  in  the  Spirit  of  the  Times.  This  represented  the  horse 
as  a  light  chestnut  about  fifteen  hands  high,  with  star  and  snip 
and  two  white  hind  feet.  He  was  represented  to  have  been  foaled 
1837  and  to  be  by  a  horse  called  American  Star,  son  of  Cock  of 
the  Rock,  by  Duroc;  dam  Sally  Slouch  by  Henry,  the  race  horse; 
grandam  by  imported  Messenger.  As  there  was  no  horse  of  that 
name,  so  far  as  I  knew,  by  Cock  of  the  Rock,  but  as  there  was 
one  of  that  name  by  Duroc,  I  wrote  to  know  whether  this  was  not. 
the  breeding  of  the  sire,  and  the  answer  came  that  it  might  have 
been  so. 

After  the  appearance  of  this  pedigree  in  the  "Register"  I  was 
greatly  surprised  that  nobody  believed  it,  and  the  more  a  horse- 
man knew  of  the  horse  and  his  history  the  more  positive  he  was 
that  it  was  a  mistake.  Several  years  passed  away,  and  while  I 
kept  insisting  it  was  true,  the  unbelievers  became  more  persistent 
than  ever  in  their  opposition  to  the  pedigree.  The  concensus  of 
the  opinions  of  horsemen  seemed  to  be  that  the  horse  was  part 
"Canuck,"  and  this  was  the  view  held  by  his  owner,  Edmund 
Seely,  as  long  as  he  lived.  At  last  the  following  story  came  to- 


AMERICAN   STAR,    PILOT,    CHAMPION,    AND    NORMAN.          339» 

me  from  different  responsible  persons,  all  of  whom  were  person- 
ally cognizant  of  the  facts  they  related,  as  follows:  On  a  certain 
occasion  a  street  contractor  had  a  force  at  work,  grading  with 
shovels  and  carts,  near  the  foot  of  Twenty-third  Street,  I  think, 
New  York  City.  Among  the  cart  horses  there  was  a  Canadian 
stallion  and  a  frisky,  high-strung  bay  mare  that  wouldn't  work 
kindly.  One  day  during  the  noon  hour,  the  "boys"  for  amuse- 
ment brought  this  stallion  and  mare  together  and  in  due  time  the 
mare  proved  to  be  with  foal,  and  she  was  sent  over  to  Jersey  the- 
next  spring.  The  foal  she  there  dropped  was  Seely's  American 
Star.  When  I  asked  to  whom  the  mare  had  been  sent  to  be 
taken  care  of,  the  answer  came  back  quickly  naming  the  same 
man  whom  I  had  represented  as  the  breeder.  As  the  contractor 
had  no  use  for  the  colt,  as  a  matter  of  course,  the  keeper  of  the 
mare  would  take  the  colt  for  the  keeping.  There  is  nothing 
unnatural  nor  unreasonable  in  this  story,  and  it  bears  a  pretty 
strong  resemblance  to  the  way  the  dam  of  the  famous  George  M. 
Patchen  came  into  the  world. 

When  the  horse  was  four  or  five  years  old  he  began  to  show  a 
fine  trotting  step  and  he  was  sold  to  John  Blauvelt,  of  New  York, 
for  a  driving  horse.  His  feet  not  being  strong,  in  the  course  of 
a  year  or  two  he  developed  a  couple  of  quarter  cracks  and  he  was 
sent  back  to  the  man  who  raised  him  to  be  cured.  In  the  winter 
of  1844-5  he  was  sold  to  Cyrus  Dubois,  of  Ulster  County,  New 
York,  who  kept  him  in  the  stud  the  seasons  of  1845,  1846  and 
1847.  His  advertisement  for  the  year  1847  reads  as  follows: 

"  American  Star  is  a  chestnut  sorrel,  eight  years  old  on  the  llth  day  of  April, 
1847,  near  16  hands  high,  etc.  ...  He  was  sired  by  the  noted  trot- 
ting horse  Mingo,  of  Long  Island,  who  was  got  by  old  Eclipse.  American  Star's 
dam,  Lady  Clinton,  the  well-known  trotting  mare  of  New  Jersey,  was 
sired  by  Sir  Henry." 

Here  we  have  the  third  pedigree  of  this  horse,  and  now  the 
question  arises,  Where  did  this  pedigree  come  from?  Cyrus 
Dubois  is  dead,  but  a  living  brother  of  his  says  this  is  the  pedi- 
gree that  Cyrus  brought  with  the  horse  from  New  Jersey.  As 
this  same  quasi-breeder  was  the  man  who  delivered  the  horse  to 
Dubois,  the  statement  of  the  living  brother  comes  very  near 
proving  that  the  first  and  the  third  of  the  pedigrees  here  given 
were  the  work  of  the  same  man.  Again,  in  1844,  this  same  quasi- 
breeder  kept  this  horse  at  Warwick  and  New  Milford,  in  Orange 
County,  New  York,  and  nobody  in  that  region  seems  to  have 


340  THE   HOUSE   OP    AMERICA. 

ever  heard  of  either  of  these  pedigrees.  And  again,  this  quasi- 
breeder  wrote  me  that  after  Edmund  Seely  had  brought  the  horse 
to  Goshen  he  went  to  see  him,  and  after  fully  identifying  him  as 
the  same  horse  he  had  bred  he  gave  the  pedigree  to  Mr.  Seely  as 
he  had  given  it  to  me.  If  this  be  true  it  is  a  very  strange  thing 
that  Mr.  Seely  never  seemed  to  know  anything  about  it,  but  per- 
sisted in  giving  the  pedigree  as  by  a  Canadian  horse  and  out  of  a 
mare  by  Henry.  Upon  the  whole,  I  long  ago  concluded  that  my 
first  and  earliest  correspondent  on  the  question  of  American 
Star's  origin  was  unfortunate  in  having  a  mental  organization 
that  placed  him  "long"  on  the  ideal,  and  "short"  on  the  real. 

His  stud  services  may  be  summarized  as  follows:  In  1844  he 
was  kept  at  Warwick  and  New  Milford,  Orange  County,  New 
York.  In  1845,  1846  and  1847  he  was  in  Ulster  County,  and  on 
the  borders  of  Orange.  In  1848  and  1849  he  was  at  Hillsdale, 
Columbia  County,  New  York.  In  1850,  1851,  1852  and  1853  he 
was  at  Goshen  and  other  points  in  Orange  County.  In  1854  he 
was  at  Elmira,  New  York.  In  1855,  it  is  said  on  good  authority, 
he  was  kept  ten  miles  below  Hudson.  Others  say  he  was  at  Pier- 
mont,  Rockland  County,  that  year.  In  1856  he  was  at  Mendota, 
Illinois.  In  1857,  1859  and  1860  he  was  again  in  Goshen.  In 
February,  1861,  he  died  at  Goshen,  the  property  of  Theodore 
Dusenbury.  In  Orange  County  his  service  fee  ranged  from  ten 
to  twenty  dollars,  and  at  last  twenty-five  dollars,  and  he  was  liber- 
ally patronized.  An  unusually  large  percentage  of  his  foals  were 
fillies,  and  he  was  essentially  a  brood-mare  sire  from  the  start. 
Opinions  differ  very  widely  among  horsemen  as  to  his  capacity 
for  speed,  some  maintaining  that  he  could  trot  in  2:35  while 
others  insisted  on  placing  him  ten  seconds  slower.  In  trying  to 
harmonize  these  conflicting  views  it  is  probably  safe  to  conclude 
that,  when  fit,  which  seldom  occurred  in  his  whole  life,  his  speed 
was  about  2:40.  He  was  always  a  cripple  from  defective  feet 
and  limbs,  and  his  whole  progeny  were  more  or  less  subject  to  the 
same  troubles. 

He  left  four  trotters  that  barely  managed  to  get  inside  the  2:30 
list  and  eight  sons  that  put  sixteen  inside  of  the  list.  But  his 
strong  point  was  in  the  producing  character  of  his  daughters. 
Thirty-six  of  these  daughters  left  forty-five  of  their  produce  in- 
side of  2:30.  The  disparity  in  the  producing  power  of  the  sexes 
in  this  family  is  very  remarkable  and,  in  a  breeding  sense,  very 
instructive.  In  the  light  of  what  has  been  developed  in  this 


AMERICAN   STAR,    PILOT,    CHAMPION,    AND   NORMAN.          341 

family  in  the  past  fifty  years,  we  are  certainly  ready  to  form  a 
safe  estimate  of  its  value  as  a  factor  in  the  combination  that  goes 
to  make  up  a  breed  of  trotters.  Star  mares  gave  us  a  Dexter  and 
a  Nettie,  and  all  the  world  thought  that  was  the  blood  that  was 
to  live  on  and  on  in  the  new  breed.  But,  while  Hambletonian 
was  able  to  get  great  trotters  from  Star  mares,  he  was  not  able  to 
get,  through  their  attenuated  trotting  inheritance,  sons  that 
would  be  as  great  as  himself.  To  his  cover  Star  mares  produced 
no  such  great  sires  as  George  Wilkes,  Electioneer,  Egbert,  Happy 
Medium,  and  Strathmore.  In  the  instances  of  Dictator  and 
Aberdeen  there  was  a  reasonable  measure  of  success,  but  all  the 
others — and  there  were  many  of  them — proved  comparative 
failures.  There  is  a  lesson  taught  here  that  any  one  can  in- 
terpret. 

AMERICAN  STAR  (CONKLIN'S)  was  a  chestnut  horse,  foaled 
1851,  and  got  by  Seely's  American  Star,  and  his  dam  has  been 
variously  represented,  with  nothing  established  as  to  her  blood. 
He  was  bred  by  a  Mr.  Randall,  of  Orange  County,  and  was  among 
the  first  from  his  sire  to  attract  attention.  He  came  into  the- 
hands  of  E.  K.  Conklin  when  young,  and  was  taken  by  him  to 
Philadelphia,  and  was  owned  by  him  during  his  lifetime.  He 
gave  early  promise  of  making  a  trotter,  and  from  1865  to  1868  he 
was  on  the  turf,  more  or  less,  and  left  a  record  of  2:33.  His  stud 
services  were  confined  to  the  region  of  Philadelphia  till  the  year 
1872,  when  he  was  taken  back  to  Orange  County  and  died  there. 
Three  of  his  get  entered  the  2:30  list;  two  of  his  sons  got  one- 
trotter  each  and  four  or  five  of  his  daughters  produced  one  each. 

At  one  time  the  name  "American  Star"  was  very  popular,  and 
quite  a  number  of  stallions  were  so  named  that  were  bogus;  but 
his  son  Magnolia  put  two  in  the  2:30  list;  one  son  got  three  trot- 
ters, and  three  daughters  produced  five  performers.  His  son 
Star  of  Catskill  got  two  performers,  and  his  son  King  Pharaoh 
got  four  pacers  and  all  of  them  fast.  The  family  has  not  grown 
strong  either  in  numbers  or  in  merit.  It  has  been  carried,  so 
far,  by  the  influences  of  stronger  blood,  and  it  seems  destined  to 
complete  absorption  and  extinction  in  more  potent  strains. 

PILOT,  the  head  of  the  Pilot  family,  was  a  black  pacing  horse,  and 
of  later  years  he  has  been  generally  designated  as  "Old  Pacing 
Pilot."  He  was  foaled  about  1826,  and  nothing  is  known  of  his 
origin  or  his  blood.  From  his  make-up  and  appearance  he  was 
generally  considered  a  Canadian,  as  was  the  custom  at  that  time, 


312  THE    HOUSE    OF   AMERICA. 

and  I  think  I  have  used  this  term  myself  in  referring  to  the  horse, 
but  there  is  really  no  foundation  for  crediting  him  to  that  source. 
The  earliest  information  we  have  of  him  is  from  an  unpublished 
source,  to  the  effect  that  he  was  well  known  to  certain  sporting 
men  about  Covington,  Kentucky.  He  next  appears  in  New 
Orleans,  hitched  to  a  peddler's  cart,  but  really  looking  for  a 
match  as  a  green  pacer.  To  promote  this  object,  Major  Dubois, 
a  sporting  man,  was  taken  into  the  confidence  of  his  owner,  and 
it  is  said  the  horse  showed  him  a  mile  in  2:26  with  one  hundred 
and  sixty-five  pounds  on  his  back,  and  the  major  bought  him  for 
one  thousand  dollars.  In  1832  Dubois  sold  him  to  Glasgow  & 
Heinsohn,  a  livery  stable  firm  of  Louisville,  Kentucky,  and  he 
remained  the  property  of  that  firm  till  he  died,  about  1855.  It 
has  been  asserted  with  some  semblance  of  authority  that  he  could 
trot  as  well  as  pace,  but  this  seems  to  be  wholly  apocryphal,  and 
on  this  point  I  am  prepared  to  speak  without  hesitation  or  doubt. 
A  large  breeder  in  the  vicinity  of  Louisville,  whom  I  have  learned 
to  trust  implicitly,  through  the  intercourse  of  many  years,  has 
assured  me  repeatedly  that  he  knew  the  horse  and  his  master 
well,  and  that  he  had  seen  him  very  often,  for  years,  that  he 
would  not  trot,  and  that  his  master  could  not  make  him  trot  a  step. 
On  the  occasion  of  a  very  deep  fall  of  snow  he  was  taken  out  to 
see  whether  that  would  not  compel  him  to  trot,  and  he  went 
rolling  and  tumbling  about  with  no  more  gait  than  a  hobbled 
hog. 

He  left  a  numerous  progeny,  most  of  them  pacers,  with  some 
trotters.  We  know  but  little  of  their  merits,  as  at  that  period 
pacing  and  trotting  races  were  carried  on,  generally,  on  guerrilla 
principles,  and  no  records  kept,  except  at  a  few  of  the  more 
prominent  occasions.  His  fastest  pacer,  probably,  was  Bear 
Grass,  and  there  is  a  little  history  here  that  will  be  interesting 
further  on.  My  late  friend,  Edmund  Pearce,  had  always,  from 
childhood,  been  a  great  admirer  of  the  grand  old  saddle  mare, 
Nancy  Taylor.  She  had  been  bred  to  Old  Pilot  and  produced  a 
colt  foal,  which  Mr.  Pearce  bought  when  young  and  named  him 
Bear  Grass.  This  was  the  first  piece  of  horseflesh  he  ever 
owned,  and  he  didn't  think  he  had  ever  owned  a  better  one. 
He  was  amazingly  fast,  and  could  go  away  from  all  competitors, 
but  unfortunately  an  accident  befell  him  that  ended  his  career 
before  he  reached  maturity.  Bear  Grass  had  a  half-sister 
called  Nancy  Pope,  being  the  daughter  of  Nancy  Taylor,  that 


AMERICAN   STAR,    PILOT,    CHAMPION,    AND   NORMAN.         343 

-was  afterward  bred  to  Old  Pilot,  and  she  produced  the  famous 
Pilot  Jr.,  that  was  the  fastest  trotter  from  the  loins  of  the  old 
pacer.  Pilot,  Jr.  took  the  diagonal  form  of  the  trot  from  his 
dam  and  never  paced.  It  is  worthy  of  noting  that  Nancy  Taylor 
and  Nancy  Pope — mother  and  daughter — produced  old  Pilot's 
fastest  pacer  and  fastest  trotter. 

PILOT  JR.  (ALEXANDER'S)  was  a  grey  horse,  foaled  1844,  "got 
by  old  Pacing  Pilot;  dam  Nancy  Pope,  grandam  Nancy  Taylor." 
This  is  the  literal  version  of  his  pedigree  as  given  by  his  first 
owners  and  as  given  by  W.  J.  Bradley  and  others  who  had  him 
in  charge  year  after  year  in  the  region  of  Lexington,  according 
to  the  different  advertisements,  and  no  change  ever  appeared  till 
the  horse  was  bought  and  taken  to  Woodburn  Farm.  Then,  for 
the  first  time  we  learned  that  Nancy  Pope  was  got  by  Havoc, 
thoroughbred  son  of  Sir  Charles,  and  that  Nancy  Taylor  was  got 
by  Alfred,  an  imported  horse.  This  was  not  the  work  of  Mr.  R. 
A.  Alexander,  an  honorable  man,  but  the  work  of  the  profes- 
sional pedigree  manufacturer,  who  exploited  his  inventive  skill 
very  widely  through  the  early  catalogues  of  that  great  establish- 
ment. As  a  matter  of  historic  fact,  Pilot  Jr.'s  dam  was  Nancy 
Pope,  but  nothing  is  known  of  her  sire,  and  Nancy  Pope  was  out 
of  Nancy  Taylor,  about  whose  pedigree  nothing  whatever  is 
known.  But  as  the  subject  of  Pilot  Jr.  's  pedigree  is  exhaus- 
tively treated  in  Chapter  XXIX.,  the  details  need  not  be 
further  dealt  with  here. 

The  training  of  Pilot  Jr.  commenced  when  he  was  five  years 
old,  and  after  the  close  of  his  stud  seasons  he  was  kept  at  it,  in  a 
moderate  way,  for  several  years,  and  it  is  said  he  never  mani- 
fested any  inclination  to  strike  a  pace.  He  was  engaged  in  some 
races,  and  his  advertisement  claims  he  won  several,  giving  the 
names  of  horses  he  had  beaten,  but  the  time  made  seems  to  be 
carefully  avoided.  He  could  probably  trot  in  about  2:50  or  a 
little  better.  He  and  all  his  family,  so  far  as  I  can  learn,  were 
willful  and  hard  to  manage  in  their  training,  and  were,  there- 
fore, in  danger  of  becoming  unreliable,  but  they  were  fast  for 
their  day,  and  dead  game  campaigners.  There  is  one  particular 
in  which  this  horse  seemed  to  surpass  nearly  all  others  and  that 
was  in  his  power  to  eliminate  the  running  instinct  and  to  plant 
the  trotting  instinct  in  his  progeny  from  running-bred  mares. 
It  is  doubtless  true  that  many  of  those  mares,  so  classed,  were 
only  running  bred  on  paper;  but  the  fact  still  remains,  and  it  is 


344  THE   HOUSE    OF   AMERICA. 

supported  by  a  sufficient  number  of  authentic  instances,  to  justify 
the  conclusion  that  his  potency  in  this  direction  was  remarkable. 

During  the  troublous  times  of  the  war  many  of  his  early  pro- 
geny were  lost  or  destroyed,  but  from  his  own  loins  he  put  eight 
performers  in  the  2:30  list  and  others  not  far  away.  Six  of  his 
sons  became  the  sires  of  forty-one  performers,  and  eighteen  of 
his  daughters  produced  forty-one  performers.  Although  the 
official  records  do  not  show  that  Pilot  Jr.  got  any  pacers,  it  is 
nevertheless  true  that  he  did  get  some  very  fast  ones.  But  when 
we  get  past  the  period  when  the  pacer  was  considered  a  bastard 
and  kept  out  of  sight,  we  meet  with  some  astonishing  facts.  As 
an  example,  take  Miss  Eussell,  the  greatest  of  all  the  Pilots. 
First,  she  produced  a  pacer  that  was  changed  to  the  diagonal 
instead  of  the  lateral  step,  and  then  stood  for  years  as  the  cham- 
pion trotter  of  the  world.  Second,  her  son  Nutwood  has  placed 
twenty  pacers  in  the  2:30  list;  her  son  Mambrino  Eussell  has 
placed  five  there,  and  her  son  Lord  Russell  has  placed  five  there. 
This  brief  and  hasty  exhibit  of  what  the  descendants  of  Miss 
Russell  are  doing  seems  to  upset  ail  the  laws  of  heredity,  provided 
always  that  her  dam  was  a  thoroughbred  mare.  The  evidence 
that  the  breeding  of  this  reputed  " thoroughbred"  mare  is  wholly 
unknown  is  considered  in  another  part  of  this  volume. 

In  a  few  odd  instances,  in  the  male  lines  of  descent  from  Pilot 
Jr.,  the  trotting  and  pacing  instinct  seem  to  be  transmitted  in 
stronger  measure  than  in  any  of  the  other  minor  families,  but  the 
day  of  its  submersion  is  not  far  distant.  The  survival  of  the 
fittest  is  the  law  of  Nature. 

CHAMPION,  the  head  of  the  Champion  family,  was  a  beautiful 
golden  chestnut,  sixteen  hands  high  and  without  marks.  He  was- 
bred  by  George  Raynor,of  Huntington,  Long  Island,  and  was  foaled 
1842.  He  was  got  by  Almack,  son  of  Mambrino,  by  Messenger; 
dam  Spirit,  by  Engineer  Second,  son  of  Engineer,  by  Messenger, 
and  sire  of  the  famous  Lady  Suffolk.  This  is  enough  Messenger 
blood  to  please  the  most  fastidious,  but  I  think  there  was  still 
more  beyond  the  Engineer  mare.  When  eighteen  months  old 
this  colt  showed  phenomenal  speed  when  led  behind  a  sulky,  and 
when  three  years  old  he  was  driven  a  full  mile  to  harness  in  3:05, 
a  rate  of  speed  which,  at  that  time  had  never  been  equaled  by  a 
colt  of  that  age.  This  made  him  "champion"  as  a  three-year- 
old  and  William  T.  Porter  named  him  Champion.  After  this, 
performance  Mr.  John  Sniffin,  a  merchant  of  Brooklyn,  bought 


AMERICAN'    STAR,    PILOT,    CHAMPION,    AND    NORMAN.         345 

liim,  and  in  June,  1846,  Mr.  William  R.  Grinnell  paid  two  thou- 
sand six  hundred  dollars  for  him  and  took  him  to  Cayuga  County, 
New  York.  After  keeping  Champion  in  that  county  till  the 
close  of  the  season  of  1849,  Mr.  Grinnell  concluded  to  sell  the 
horse,  as  in  all  that  time  he  had  not  covered  one  hundred  mares. 
Mr.  Grinnell  complained  that  the  farmers  did  not  appreciate  the 
horse,  and  many  of  them  failed  to  pay  for  his  services.  But  the 
fault  was  not  all  on  the  part  of  the  farmers,  for  the  price,  to 
them,  was  very  high,  and  he  was  a  very  uncertain  foal  getter. 

In  April,  1850,  he  was  sent  to  New  York  and  kept  in  the  stable 
of  Mr.  Van  Cott,  on  the  Harlem  road.  He  had  been  very  badly 
handled,  and  Mr.  Van  Cott  says  he  had  been  abused  and  ill- 
treated,  and  when  he  came  to  his  place  he  was  as  vicious  and 
savage  as  a  wild  beast.  The  horse  was  kept  there  for  sale,  and  in 
his  daily  exercise  Mr.  Van  Cott  says  he  could  "show  considera- 
bly better  than  2:40  at  any  time."  In  1851  he  was  sent  over  to 
Jersey  and  kept  for  public  use  at  a  fee  of  fifty  dollars,  by  Samuel 
Taylor,  at  Newmarket,  Metuchen,  Boundbrook  and  Millstone. 
After  making  three  or  four  seasons  in  the  region  of  Boundbrook, 
in  the  year  1854,  Mr.  Grinnell,  who  still  owned  him,  sold  him  to 
Mr.  James  Harkness,  of  St.  Louis,  Missouri,  for  about  seven 
hundred  and  dfty  dollars.  On  reaching  St.  Louis  he  proved  to 
l>e  as  dangerous  as  ever,  and  no  man  dared  to  go  into  his  stall, 
except  Mr.  Harkness  and  one  assistant.  In  1858  Mr.  Harkness 
sold  him  to  Thomas  T.  Smith,  of  Independence,  Missouri,  for 
one  thousand  dollars.  He  was  there  stolen  by  "jayhawkers" 
and  taken  to  Leavenworth,  Kansas,  where  he  made  two  seasons 
.and  died  1864.  Although  he  lived  to  be  old,  he  left  compara- 
tively few  colts,  but  a  large  proportion  of  that  few  were  of  excel- 
lent quality  and  many  of  them  trotters. 

CHAMPIOX  (SCOBEY'S  also  known  as  King's  Champion)  was  the 
l)est  son  of  GrinnelPs  Champion,  the  son  of  Almack,  and  he  came 
out  of  a  mare  called  Bird,  by  Redbird,  son  of  Billy  Duroc.  He  was 
foaled  1849,  and  was  bred  by  Jesse  M .  Davis,  then  of  Cayuga  County, 
New  York,  and  sold  to  David  King,  of  North ville,  New  York, 
.and  by  him  in  1861  to  Mr.  Kellogg,  of  Battle  Creek,  Michigan. 
He  was  repurchased  by  Messrs.  Backus,  Scobey  and  Burlew  in 
August,  1865,  and  soon  became  the  property  of  Mr.  C.  Scobey 
and  died  his  in  May,  1874.  It  has  been  claimed  this  horse  had 
speed  and  a  record  of  2:42  in  1857,  but  I  have  no  data  to  deter- 
mine how  fast  he  was.  From  his  own  loins  he  put  eight  per- 


346  THE   HOUSE   OF   AMEKICA. 

formers  in  the  2:30  list,  two  of  which  were  phenomenally  fastr 
although  their  records  do  not  show  it.  Here  I  allude  to  Nettie 
Burlew  and  Sorrel  Dapper,  more  generally  known  as  "The 
Auburn  Horse."  The  latter  was  a  long,  leggy,  light  chestnut, 
with  a  tremendous  stride,  and  Hiram  Woodruff  did  not  hesitate 
to  say  he  was  a  faster  horse  than  Dexter.  This  Champion  was  a- 
sire  of  excellent  quality,  although  but  a  few  of  his  progeny  were 
developed.  He  left  six  sons  that  were  the  sires  of  forty-four 
trotters,  and  seven  daughters  that  produced  nine  performers. 

CHAMPION  (GOODING'S)  was  a  bright  bay  horse  with  black 
points,  standing  fifteen  and  three-quarter  hands  high.  He  was 
got  by  Scobey's  Champion,  dam  the  trotting  mare  Cynthia,  by 
Bartlett's  Turk,  son  of  Weddle's  imported  Turk;  grandam  Fanny, 
by  Scobey's  Black  Prince;  great-grandam  Bett,  by  Rockplanter, 
son  of  Duroc;  great-great-grandam  Kate,  represented  to  be  a 
Messenger  mare.  He  was  foaled  1853,  and  was  bred  by  Almeron 
Ott,  Cayuga  County,  New  York,  and  traded  to  Mr.  Stearns,  from 
whom  he  passed  to  his  late  owners,  T.  W.  and  W.  Gooding,  On- 
tario County,  New  York.  He  died  June,  1883.  This  horse  was- 
peddled  about  in  Seneca  County  at  a  fee  of  five  dollars,  and  had 
a  very  light  patronage  among  the  farmers.  At  1?  st  he  was  sold, 
with  difficulty,  at  Canandaigua,  for  three  hundred  dollars  to  the- 
Messrs.  Gooding,  and  he  brought  them  a  handsome  income  as. 
long  as  he  lived.  As  his  reputation  as  a  sire  of  speed  spread 
abroad,  the  quality  of  the  mares  brought  to  him  improved,  and 
among  them  were  some  with  good  trotting  inheritance.  Of  hi& 
progeny,  seventeen  entered  the  2:30  list,  the  fastest  in  2:21,  and 
they  were  good  campaigners.  It  is  a  remarkable  fact  that  only 
one  of  his  sons  proved  himself  a  trotting  sire,  and  he  left  but  a 
single  representative.  On  the  female  side  of  the  house  he  was- 
more  successful,  for  six  of  his  daughters  produced  seven  per- 
formers. 

CHARLEY  B.  was  a  bay  horse,  sixteen  hands  high,  and  was  bred 
by  Charles  Burlew,  of  Union  Springs,  New  York.  He  was  foaled 
1869,  and  was  got  by  Scobey's  Champion,  son  of  Champion,  by 
Almack,  and  proved  himself  the  best  son  of  his  sire.  He  was 
out  of  a  mare  well  known  as  "Old  Jane"  that  was  the  dam  of 
Myrtle  with  a  record  of  2:25-^.  Several  pedigrees  have  been  pro- 
vided for  this  mare  that  did  not  prove  reliable,  and  they  were  all 
careful  to  endow  her  with  plenty  of  Messenger  blood.  After 
searching  for  the  facts  through  some  years,  the  only  version  of  it 


AMERICAN   STAR,    PILOT,    CHAMPION,    AND   NORMAN.         347 

that  seemed  to  be  worthy  of  credence  showed  that  her  sire  was  a 
horse  called  Magnum  Bonum  and  there  it  ended.  In  his  racing 
career  this  horse  was  started  sometimes  under  the  name  of 
"Lark."  He  has  six  heats  to  his  credit  in  2:30  and  better,  and 
a  record  of  2:25.  From  his  own  loins  he  has  twenty-two  trotters 
in  the  2:30  list.  Considering  the  respectable  number  this  horse 
shows  in  the  2:30  list,  his  great  nervous  energy,  his  vigorous  con- 
stitution, and  the  number  of  years  he  was  liberally  patronized  in 
the  stud,  it  is  a  most  notable  fact  that  he  has  but  two  sons  that 
are  producers.  Six  of  his  daughters  have  produced.  As  a  propa- 
gator of  speed  in  the  coming  generations,  this  horse  seems  to  be 
even  a  greater  failure  than  his  half-brother,  Gooding's  Champion. 

NIGHT  HAWK  was  a  chestnut  son  of  Grinnell's  Champion. 
He  was  bred  by  John  S.  Van  Kirk,  of  Newark,  New  Jersey,  and 
his  dam  was  by  Sherman's  Young  Eclipse,  son  of  American 
Eclipse.  He  was  foaled  1855-6.  In  1862  Mr.  Van  Kirk  took 
him  to  Kalamazoo,  Michigan,  thence  to  Paw  Paw  in  1872,  and  in 
1879  he  was  returned  to  Kalamazoo,  owned  by  A.  T.  Tuthill. 
He  was  something  of  a  trotter,  and  had  a  record  of  2:36,  under 
the  name  of  Champion,  when  he  was  controlled  by  Mr.  D.  B. 
Hibbard,  I  think.  He  was  shown  at  a  State  fair,  held  at  Lans- 
ing, on  a  poor  half-mile  track,  it  is  said,  and  trotted  a  mile  in 
2:31^,  and  for  this  performance  he  received  a  piece  of  plate  from 
the  society  testifying  to  this  fact.  He  has  but  two  representa- 
tives in  the  2:30  list,  and  three  of  his  sons  have  five  trotters  to 
their  credit,  while  six  of  his  daughters  have  produced  seven  per- 
formers. He  lived  to  an  old  age. 

The  merits  and  demerits  of  this  family  are  very  marked.  The 
head  of  it  seems  to  have  possesssed  great  nerve  force  and  an  un- 
mistakable instinct  to  trot,  but  he  was  irritable  and  vicious  in  his 
temper.  Both  these  qualities — the  desirable  and  the  undesirable 
alike — he  seems  to  have  transmitted  to  his  offspring.  I  have  seen 
Gooding's  Champion,  and  he  had  the  temper  and  disposition  of 
his  grandsire.  It  appears  that  the  original  Champion  was  a  shy 
breeder,  and  I  am  disposed  to  think  he  inherited  this  infirmity 
from  his  sire,  Almack,  and  whether  the  inability  of  his  sons  and 
grandsons  to  get  sires  of  trotters  may  be  accounted  for  from 
this  cause  would  be  a  very  difficult  question  to  answer.  There 
are  several  others  of  this  family,  East  and  West,  that  have  single 
representatives  in  the  2:30  list,  that  I  have  not  enumerated,  but 
from  the  statistics,  as  they  now  stand,  it  seems  probable  that 


THE    HOUSE    OF    AMERICA. 


whatever  is  good  in  this  family  will  be  swallowed  up  in  other 
tribes  that  are  more  prepotent  and  positive  in  the  trotting  in- 
stinct. 


,  OR  THE  MORSE  HORSE.  —  This  horse  was  originally 
named  "Norman,"  but  in  later  years  he  was  more  generally  and 
widely  known  as  The  Morse  Horse.  His  family  is  not  large,  but 
.some  of  his  descendants  have  shown  great  speed  and  great  racing 
qualities.  His  origin  and  breeding  as  given  below  have  resulted 
from  a  wide  and  laborious  correspondence,  and,  I  think,  can  be 
.accepted  as  trustworthy.  He  was  bred  by  James  McNitt,  of 
Hartford,  Washington  County,  New  York,  who  was  a  large 
farmer  and  distiller.  He  was  foaled  1834,  got  by  European; 
dam  Beck,  by  Harris7  Hambletonian;  grandam  Mozza,  by  Pea- 
cock, son  of  imported  Messenger.  He  was  fifteen  and  three- 
quarter  hands  high,  a  dark  iron  grey  when  young,  and  became 
white  with  age.  He  had  plenty  of  bone,  was  handsome  and  a 
natural  trotter.  Something  of  the  history  of  the  animals  enter- 
ing into  this  pedigree  is  important  and  I  will  try  to  give  it  in  as 
brief  form  as  possible. 

The  breeder,  Mr.  McNitt,  was  in  the  habit  of  visiting  Montreal 
at  least  once  a  year  with  the  products  of  his  farm  and  his  dis- 
tillery. On  one  occasion  he  brought  back  three  horses  with  him, 
two  "Canucks"  and  a  very  elegant  grey  horse  that  he  called 
European,  that  was  evidently  somewhat  advanced  in  years  and 
was  a  little  knee-sprung  from  the  effects  of  hard  driving.  The 
two  "Canucks"  were  fast  trotters,  but  European  could  beat 
either  of  them.  Mr.  McNitt  represented  that  this  horse  had  been 
imported  into  Canada  from  Normandy  in  France  and  doubtless 
he  believed  it,  but  there  were  none  of  the  French,  characteristics 
about  him.  He  was  purchased  in  Montreal  about  1829  and  died 
in  Washington  County  about  1836.  The  dam  and  grandam  of 
the  Morse  Horse  were  bred  by  Mr.  Joseph  T.  Mills,  of  the  town 
of  Argyle,  in  Washington  County.  Beck,  the  dam,  was  a  bright 
bay  mare  about  sixteen  hands  high.  At  weaning  time  Mr.  Mills 
sold  her  to  Robert  Stewart,  of  Greenwich,  and  at  three  years  old 
he  sold  her  to  Mr.  McNitt.  She  was  got  by  Harris7  Hamble- 
tonian, when  he  was  kept  by  John  Williams,  Jr.  This  is  estab- 
lished quite  satisfactorily  and  circumstantially.  Mozza,  the  dam 
of  Beck,  was  a  chestnut  mare,  without  marks,  and  was  got  by 
Peacock,  a  son  of  imported  Messenger  that  was  owned  by  Mr. 


AMERICAN   STAR,    PILOT,    CHAMPION   AND   NORMAN.  349" 

Emerson  in  Saratoga  County  and  was  afterward  burned  up  in  his 
stable.  This  son  of  Messenger,  called  Peacock,  was  entirely  new 
to  me  then  I  was  investigating  this  pedigree  in  1876  and  I  was 
disposed  to  reject  it,  but  Mr.  Mills  certainly  had  a  horse  of  that 
name  and  he  represented  him  to  be  a  son  of  Messenger,  and  he 
probably  was,  but  I  do  not  know  that  he  was  so  bred. 

Mr.  McNitt  sold  the  colt  at  three  years  old  to  Martin  Stover, 
who  lived  on  his  place,  for  eighty  dollars;  the  next  year  Stover 
sold  him  to  James  Mills.  In  1840  Mills  sold  him  to  Mr.  Tefft 
and  Zack  Adams,  and  they  sold  him  not  long  after  to  Philip 
Allen  and  Calvin  Morse,  of  White  Creek.  Mr.  Morse  had  him 
a  number  of  years  and  when  old  sold  him  to  Mr.  Grant,  and  he 
died  at  Spiegletown  in  Renssalaer  County,  New  York.  He  was 
a  very  perfect,  natural  trotter,  and  his  speed  was  developed  to 
some  extent.  In  August,  1847  or  1848,  Mr.  Morse  put  him  into 
the  hands  of  John  Case,  of  Saratoga  Springs,  the  driver  of  Lady 
Moscow,  to  prepare  him  for  the  State  Fair,  at  which  he  expected 
to  meet  the  famous  Black  Hawk.  Mr.  J.  L.  D.  Eyclesheimer,  a 
very  intelligent  gentleman,  formerly  of  the  region  of  Saratoga, 
wrote  that  while  the  horse  was  in  Case's  hands,  he,  with  Mr. 
Morse,  timed  him  a  full  mile  in  2:40^.  At  the  State  Fair  he  was 
all  out  of  fix  and  Black  Hawk  beat  him  in  the  second  and  third 
heats.  He  won  the  first  heat  in  2:52|.  In  the  rivalries  between 
stallions  at  agricultural  fairs,  however,  is  a  very  poor  place  to 
look  for  fair  work  and  fair  judgment,  either  from  the  stand  or 
from  the  spectators. 

GENERAL  TAYLOR  was  a  grey  horse,  foaled  1847,  got  by  the 
Morse  Horse,  dam  the  trotting  mare  Flora,  a  New  York  road 
mare  of  unknown  breeding.  He  was  bred  by  the  brothers  Eycles- 
heimer, then  of  Pittstown,  New  York.  He  was  taken  to  Janes- 
ville,  Wisconsin,  1850,  and  thence  to  California,  1854,  where  he 
trotted  thirty  miles  against  time  in  one  hour  forty-seven  minutes 
and  fifty-nine  seconds.  He  also  beat  New  York  a  ten-mile  race 
in  29:41£.  This  horse  has  no  representative  in  the  2:30  list,  but 
his  blood  has  always  been  very  highly  esteemed  in  California  for 
its  speed,  but  more  especially  for  its  game  qualities.  Honest 
Ance  was  another  son  of  the  Morse  Horse  that  did  a  great  deal 
of  racing  in  California,  although  he  has  no  record  in  the  2:30 
list.  He  was  a  chestnut  gelding,  and  was  managed  by  the 
notorious  Jim  Eoff,  who  was  always  ready  to  win  or  to  lose  as 
money  seemed  to  suggest. 


350  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 


(ALEXANDER'S)  was  a  brown  horse,  foaled  about  1846, 
got  by  the  Morse  Horse,  son  of  European;  dam  one  of  a  pair  of 
brown  mares  purchased  by  John  N.  Slocum  of  Samuel  Slocum,  a 
Quaker  of  Leroy,  Jefferson  County,  New  York,  and  represented  to 
be  by  Magnum  Bonum.  These  mares  passed  to  Mr.  Russell,  and 
from  him  to  Titcomb  &  Waldron,  who  bred  the  better  of  the  two  to 
the  Morse  Horse,  and  the  produce  was  Alexander's  Norman.  This 
colt  passed  through  several  hands  till  he  reached  Henry  L.  Barker, 
of  Clinton,  New  York,  and  about  1860,  he  sold  him  to  the  late 
R.  A.  Alexander,  of  Woodburn  Farm,  Kentucky.  He  died  1878. 
The  original  version  of  this  pedigree,  as  put  upon  Mr.  Alexander 
and  advertised  by  him,  as  were  many  others,  was  wholly  fictitious 
on  the  side  of  the  dam.  He  was  not  retained  long  at  Woodburn 
Farm.  He  does  not  seem  to  have  been  a  uniform  transmitter  of 
speed,  but  when  it  did  appear  it  was  apt  to  to  be  of  a  high  order. 
He  left  but  two  representatives  in  the  2:30  list,  Lula,  2:15,  with 
fifty-six  heats,  and  May  Queen,  2:20,  with  twenty-five  heats.  He 
left  four  sons  that  became  the  sires  of  fifty-eight  performers  and 
thirteen  daughters  that  produced  nineteen  performers.  Such 
sons  as  Swigert  and  Blackwood  speak  well  for  his  transmitting 
powers. 

SWIGERT  was  a  brown  horse,  foaled  1866,  got  by  Alexander's 
Norman,  son  of  the  Morse  Horse;  dam  Blandina,  by  Mambrino 
Chief;  grandam  the  Burch  Mare,  by  Brown  Pilot,  son  of  Copper 
Bottom,  pacer.  He  was  bred  at  Woodburn  Farm,  Kentucky, 
and  when  young  became  the  property  of  Richard  Richards,  of 
Racine,  Wisconsin,  where  he  remained  many  years  and  passed  to 
F.  J.  Ayres,  of  Burlington,  Wisconsin.  As  a  prepotent  sire  this 
horse  stands  high  in  the  list  of  great  horses.  This  may  be  ac- 
counted for  in  great  part  by  the  speed-producing  qualities  which 
he  inherited  from  his  dam.  I  am  not  informed  as  to  the  amount 
of  training  he  may  have  had,  nor  of  the  rate  of  speed  he  may 
have  been  able  to  show.  He  placed  forty-four  trotters  and  two 
pacers  in  the  2:30  list.  Thirty-three  of  his  sons  became  the  sires 
of  sixty-one  trotters  and  fourteen  pacers.  Twenty-three  of  his 
daughters  produced  twenty-one  trotters  and  six  pacers.  From 
the  number  of  his  sons  that  have  already  shown  their  ability  to 
get  trotters,  it  is  fair  to  presume  that  his  name  will  be  per- 
petuated. He  died  in  1892. 

BLACKWOOD  was  a  black  horse,  foaled  1866,  got  by  Alexander's 
Norman,  son  of  the  Morse  Horse;  dam  by  Mambrino  Chief; 


AMERICAN   STAR,    PILOT,    CHAMPION,    AND   NORMAN.         351 

grandam  a  fast  trotting  dun  mare,  brought  from  Ohio,  pedigree 
unknown.  He  was  bred  by  D.  Swigert,  Spring  Station,  Ken- 
tucky, and  foaled  the  property  of  Andrew  Steele,  of  Scott  County, 
Kentucky.  At  five  years  old  he  was  sold  to  John  W.  Conley,  and 
by  him  to  Harrison  Durkee,  of  New  York,  and  was  afterward 
owned  at  Ticonderoga,  New  York.  He  made  a  record  of  2:31 
when  three  years  old,  which,  at  that  day,  was  considered  phenom- 
enal for  a  colt  of  that  age.  His  opportunities  in  the  stud  were 
not  of  the  best,  but  nine  of  his  progeny  entered  the  2:30  list; 
eleven  of  his  sons  got  twenty  performers,  and  twenty -five  of  his 
daughters  produced  thirty-seven  performers. 


CHAPTEE   XXVI. 

THE   BLUE   BULL   AND   OTHER   MINOR   FAMILIES. 

Blue  Bull,  the  once  leading  sire — His  lineage  and  history — His  family  rank — 
The  Cadmus  family — Pocahontas — Smuggler — Tom  Rolfe — Young  Rolfe- 
and  Nelson — The  Tom  Hal  family — The  various  Tom  Hals — Brown  Hal — 
The  Kentucky  Hunters — Flora  Temple — Edwin  Forrest — The  Drew  Horse 
and  his  descendants — The  Hiatogas. 

BLUE  BULL,  the  real  head  of  this  family,  was  one  of  the  most 
remarkable  horses  that  this  or  any  other  country  has  produced. 
He  was  a  light  chestnut,  just  a  little  over  fifteen  hands  high, 
with  one  hind  pastern  white  and  a  star  in  his  forehead.  He  was- 
strongly  built  and  his  limbs  were  excellent,  except  perhaps  a 
little  light  just  below  the  knee.  He  was  foaled  1858  and  died 
July  11,  1880.  He  was  bred  by  Elijah  Stone,  of  Stone's  Cross- 
ing, Johnson  County,  Indiana.  For  a  time  he  was  owned  by 
Lewis  Loder  and  Daniel  Dorrel,  before  he  passed  into  the  hands 
of  James  Wilson,  of  Rushville,  Indiana,  who  kept  him  many  years 
and  whose  property  he  died.  At  one  time  he  stood  at  the 
head  of  the  list  of  all  trotting  sires  in  the  world,  and  yet  he 
could  not  trot  a  step  himself,  but  he  could  pace  amazingly  fast, 
and  it  was  claimed  he  could  pace  a  quarter  in  thirty  seconds. 
He  was  the  first  and  only  horse  that  was  ever  able  to  snatch  the 
scepter  from  the  great  Hambletonian  family,  but  after  a  brief 
reign  of  a  couple  of  years  he  had  to  surrender  it  again  to  that 
family,  where,  from  present  appearances,  it  is  destined  to  remain. 

The  breeding  of  this  horse  is  very  obscure,  and  after  we  have 
told  all  that  is  known  about  it  we  will  not  have  given  very  much 
information.  He  was  got  by  a  large  dun  pacing  horse  that  was 
known  as  Pruden's  Blue  Bull,  and  he  by  a  blue  roan  horse 
known  as  Herring's  Blue  Bull,  or  Ohio  Farmer.  The  latter  was 
taken  to  Butler  County,  Ohio,  from  Chester  County,  Pennsyl- 
vania, and  it  has  been  said,  without  confirmation,  that  he  was  of 
Chester  Ball  stock.  He  was  a  large,  strong  farm  horse,  a  natural 
pacer,  as  were  many  of  his  progeny,  and  dun  and  roan  colors  were: 
very  prevalent  among  them.  He  died  the  property  of  Mr.  Mer- 


THE   BLUE    BULL   AND    OTHER   MINOR    FAMILIES.  353 

ring  about  1843.  His  son,  Pruden's  Blue  Bull,  was  of  a  dun 
color  and  a  natural  pacer,  but  his  dam  has  never  been  traced. 
He  was  large,  strong,  rather  coarse,  and  had  some  reputation  as  a 
fast  pacer,  for  a  horse  of  his  size,  and  his  color  was  quite  preva- 
lent among  his  progeny.  He  was  bred  in  Butler  County,  Ohio, 
and  about  1853  was  taken  to  Boone  County,  Kentucky.  In  1861 
he  became  the  property  of  G.  B.  Loder,  of  the  same  county,  and 
in  1863  he  traded  him  to  James  Pruden,  of  Elizabethtown,  Ohio. 

The  pedigree  of  Wilson's  Blue  Bull,  the  head  of  the  family  on 
the  side  of  the  dam,  is  equally  unsatisfactory  so  far  as  the  blood 
elements  are  concerned.  We  know  that  this  dam  was  called 
Queen,  that  she  was  bred  by  Elijah  Stone,  and  that  she  was  got 
by  a  horse  called  Young  Selim,  but  we  know  nothing  about 
Young  Selim.  We  also  know  that  the  dam  of  Queen  was  called 
Bet,  and  that  Mr.  Stone  bought  her  of  Mr.  Sedan,  and  there  all 
knowledge  ends.  Since  the  days  of  the  great  racing  progenitor, 
Godolphin  Arabian,  of  whose  origin  and  blood  nobody,  living  or 
dead,  had  a  single  shadow  of  knowledge,  down  to  the  day  of  Wil- 
son's Blue  Bull,  no  horse  equally  obscure  in  his  inheritance  has 
ever  been  able  to  prove  himself  really  "great  as  a  progenitor  of 
speed. 

In  the  days  of  Blue  Bull's  rising  fame,  and  indeed  till  his  death, 
there  was  developed  such  a  condition  of  muddled  morals  as  one 
seldom  meets  with  in  a  lifetime.  Whenever  a  horse  of  unknown 
breeding,  in  any  one  of  three  or  four  States,  began  to  show  some 
speeu,  his  owner  at  once  called  him  a  Blue  Bull,  and  if  he  went 
fast  enough  to  enter  the  2:30  list,  he  was  at  once  credited  to  Blue 
Bull  by  his  friends,  and  they  were  all  ready  to  fight  for  it.  If 
the  books  of  Blue  Bull's  services  did  not  show  that  the  dam  of 
the  "unknown"  had  ever  been  within  a  hundred  miles  of  that 
horse,  it  was  all  the  worse  for  the  books.  With  a  large  number 
of  men  interested  financially  in  Blue  Bull  stock,  ready  to  claim 
everything  in  sight  and  anxiously  looking  for  something  more  to 
appear,  it  became  a  most  laborious  task  to  keep  this  class  of 
frauds  out  of  the  records.  Another  cause  of  dissent  and  dissat- 
isfaction among  the  "boomers"  of  Blue  Bull  blood  was  the  final 
discovery  of  the  breeder  in  Elijah  Stone  and  that  there  was  no 
"thoroughbred"  blood  in  his  veins.  At  that  time  a  very  large 
majority  of  the  horsemen  of  the  country  honestly  believed  that 
all  speed,  whether  at  the  pace  or  the  trot,  must  come  from  the 
gallop.  It  was  not  the  truth,  therefore,  that  these  people  were 


354  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

looking  for,  but  something  to  support  that  ignorant  and  stupid 
theory. 

A  careful  study  of  the  statistics  of  this  horse  will  teach  a  valu- 
able lesson.  He  put  fifty-six  trotters  into  the  2:30  list,,  varying 
in  speed  from  2:30  to  2:17^,  and  five  of  this  number  in  2:20  or  bet- 
ter. He  also  got  four  pacers  with  records  from  2:24^  to  2:16^. 
It  thus  appears  that  this  horse,  without  any  known  trotting 
blood,,  got  fifty-four  trotters  to  four  pacers,  which  clearly  shows 
that  an  inheritance  of  speed  at  the  pace  may  be  transmitted  at 
the  trot,  as  well  as  the  pace.  When  we  come  to  his  progeny,  we 
find  that  forty-seven  of  his  sons  have  to  their  credit  one  hundred 
and  four  performers,  making  an  average  of  a  little  more  than  two 
each.  These  sons  are  all  past  maturity  and  some  of  them  dead 
of  old  age,  and  not  one  of  them  has  ever  reached  mediocrity  in 
merit  as  a  sire.  He  left  seventy-seven  daughters  that  have  pro- 
duced one  hundred  and  seven  performers,  and  if  we  had  time  to 
trace  out  these  performers  we  would  find  that  they  were  gener- 
ally by  strains  of  blood  stronger  and  better  than  the  blood  of 
Blue  Bull.  While,  therefore,  we  can  acknowledge  Blue  Bull's 
greatness  as  a  getter  of  speed  from  his  own  loins,  we  must 
acknowledge  that  his  sons  and  daughters  as  the  producers  of  speed 
are  failures.  It  is  possible  that  some  representative  of  the  tribe 
may  spring  up  and  restore  the  prestige  of  the  family,  but  as 
the  source  is  sporadic  and  as  the  country  is  filled  up  with  trotting 
elements  that  are  more  prepotent,  it  is  more  likely  to  be  swal- 
lowed up  and  lose  its  family  identity. 

CADMUS  (known  as  Irons'  Cadmus)  was  the  head  of  a  very 
small  family  that  occasionally  developed  phenomenal  speed  either 
at  the  pace  or  the  trot.  He  was  a  chestnut  horse  nearly  sixteen 
hands  high,  strong  and  active,  with  four  white  feet.  He  was 
foaled  1840  and  was  got  by  Cadmus,  the  thoroughbred  son  of 
American  Eclipse,  and  was  bred  by  Goldsmith  Coffein,  Red  Lion, 
AVarren  County,  Ohio.  His  dam  was  a  chestnut  pacing  mare 
that  Mr.  Coffein  got  in  a  trade,  from  a  traveler,  and  nothing  was 
ever  known  of  her  breeding.  A  pedigree  was  shaped  up  for  her 
that  seemed  to  make  her  thoroughbred  and  her  son  took  a  prize 
on  it  once,  as  a  thoroughbred,  but  it  was  wholly  untrue.  Mr. 
Joh  n  Irons  of  the  same  county  became  joint  owner  in  this  horse,  and 
he  became  widely  known  as  "Irons'  Cadmus."  To  close  this  part- 
nership he  was  sold,  1850,  and  taken  to  Richmond,  Indiana;  then 


THE    BLUE    BULL   AND    OTHER    MINOR    FAMILIES.  355 

to  George  Shepher,  of  Butler  County,  Ohio,  and  next  to  a  com- 
pany in  Wheeling,  West  Virginia,  where  he  made  two  seasons, 
and  was  sold  to  St.  Louis,  Missouri,  and  died  without  further 
service,  in  1858.  From  birth  he  was  double-gaited,  inclining 
more  to  the  pace  than  to  the  trot.  From  unskillful  handling  his 
gaits  became  mixed  up  so  that  it  was  never  known  whether  he 
might  have  been  able  to  show  any  speed  or  not. 

Pocahontas,  the  pacer,  was  the  most  distinguished  of  his  get, 
and  if  there  were  no  others  of  merit  from  her  sire  this  one  alone 
would  be  sufficient  to  command  a  place  in  the  volume.  She  was 
a  large,  strong  chestnut  mare  with  four  white  legs,  a  white  face, 
.and  a  splotch  of  white  on  her  belly.  She  was  bred  by  John  0. 
Dine,  of  Butler  County,  Ohio,  and  was  foaled  1847.  Her  dam 
was  a  very  strong  mare  got  by  Probasco's  Big  Shakespeare,  a 
horse  over  sixteen  hands  and  very  heavily  proportioned,  a  very 
valuable  farm  horse  with  good  action,  many  of  whose  tribe  were 
-disposed  to  pace.  The  grandam  was  also  a  descendant  of  Va- 
lerius, that  was  brought  to  Ohio  from  New  Jersey.  Pocahontas 
passed  through  several  hands  at  very  low  prices  and  was  used  for 
all  kinds  of  heavy  farming  and  hauling  until  she  reached  the 
hands  of  L.  D.  Woodmansee,  when  her  speed  began  to  be  de- 
veloped. She  was  soon  matched  against  Ben  Higdon,  the  fast 
pacing  son  of  Abdallah,  and  beat  him  in  2:32.  In  December,  1853, 
she  was  taken  to  New  Orleans,  and  beat  several  celebrities  there 
early  the  next  spring.  Before  her  last  race  it  was  discovered  she 
was  in  foal,  and  some  two  months  afterward  she  dropped  Tom 
Rolfe.  In  the  autumn  of  1854  she  was  brought  to  the  Union 
Course,  Long  Island,  and  it  was  not  till  June,  1855,  that  her 
owners  and  managers  could  get  a  match  with  her.  At  last  Hero, 
the  famous  son  of  Harris'  Hambletonian,  met  her  for  two  thousand 
dollars,  he  to  harness  and  she  to  wagon.  In  the  first  heat  she 
distanced  the  gelding  in- 2:17-J,  and  it  was  maintained  by  her 
driver  that  she  could  have  gone  at  least  five  seconds  faster,  if  it 
had  been  necessary.  For  racing  purposes  she  was  no  longer  of 
any  value,  for  nothing  would  start  against  her.  She  was  then 
sold  and  became  a  brood  mare  at  Boston,  Massachusetts,  and 
produced  the  sires  Tom  Rolfe  and  Strideway,  Pocahontas,  2:26f. 
and  the  dams  of  May  Morning,  2:30,  and  Nancy,  2:23|,  thus  rank- 
ing as  a  great  brood  mare. 

Shanghai  Mary,  that  has  become  so  famous  as  the  dam  of 
Green  Mountain  Maid,  one  of  the  very  greatest  of  all  brood 


356  THE    HORSE    OF    AMEEICA- 

mares,  was  probably  a  daughter  of  this  same  horse,  Cadmus.  This-, 
mare,  Shanghai  Mary,  was  a  trotter  of  speed,  not  far  from  a  2:30 
gait,  and  she  won  some  races, but  she  was  hot-headed  and  unreliable. 
Notwithstanding  continuous  searches,  for  years,  her  origin  re- 
mained a  profound  mystery,  until  of  recent  date  certain  facts, 
point  to  Mr.  Coft'ein  as  her  breeder  and  Cadmus  as  her  sire. 
This  has  not  been  established  historically,  but  when  the  circum- 
stances are  understood  and  taken  in  connection  with  the  internal 
evidences,  which  are  amazingly  strong,  and  had  been  pointed  out 
and  applied  to  this  sire  long  before  the  recent  developments, 
there  remains  hardly  a  moral  doubt  that  she  was  by  Cadmus. 
The  fact  that  this  mare  is  the  maternal  grandam  of  Electioneer, 
the  greatest  of  all  trotting  sires  to  date,  makes  her  pedigree  a 
matter  of  special  interest,  and  for  details  of  the  various  investi- 
gations the  reader  is  ref  erred  to  Wallace's  Monthly,  and  to  Chapter 
XXIX.  of  this  volume. 

Pocahontas  seems  to  have  produced  but  five  foals  that  reached, 
maturity:  1855,  Tom  Rolfe,  of  which  hereafter;  1859,  Young 
Pocahontas,  by  Ethan  Allen,  a  very  fast  trotter;  1860,  May 
Queen,  by  Ethan  Allen;  1861,  May  Day,  by  Miles  Standish;  1863 
bay  colt  Strideway,  by  Black  Hawk  Telegraph.  This  was  a  very 
fast  and  promising  young  horse,  and  doubtless  would  have  stood 
among  the  fastest  stallions  of  his  day,  but  he  died  on  the  very 
eve  of  his  public  appearance  on  the  trotting  turf. 

TOM  ROLFE  had  a  checkered  existence  from  his  conception. 
His  dam,  Pocahontas,  was  bred  to  Pugh's  Aratus,  by  Abraham 
Pierce,  her  then  owner,  May  10,  1853,  and  ten  days  afterward 
she  was  sold  without  her  new  owner's  knowing  she  had  been  bred. 
He  was  thus  carried  in  his  mother's  womb,  during  her  training 
and  through  her  racing  campaign  in  New  Orleans,  until  a  little 
over  two  months  of  the  time  he  was  dropped.  During  most  of 
this  period  those  handling  the  mare  did  not  know  she  had  been 
bred,  and  hence  the  story  that  Tom  was  a  f  'catch"  colt.  He  was 
a  bay,  about  fifteen  hands  two  inches  high,  and  came  to  his  speed 
with  very  little  handling.  In  private  trials,  it  is  said,  he  had 
frequently  shown  a  mile  in  2:23.  While  on  exhibition  in  a  small 
ring  at  Dayton,  Ohio,  he  met  with  an  accident,  from  which  he 
was  ever  afterward  a  cripple.  In  this  condition  however,  he 
afterward  made  a  record  in  2:33£.  His  sire,  Pugh's  Aratus,  was 
a  large,  handsome  farm  horse,  sixteen  hands  two  inches  high,  and 
weighing  one  thousand  three  hundred  pounds.  He  was  got  by 


THE   BLUE   BULL   AND    OTHEK    MINOR   FAMILIES.  357 

Phares'  Aratus,  out  of  a  fast  pacing  mare.  There  is  no  evidence 
whatever  going  to  show  that  Phare's  Aratus  was  a  son  of  Aratus 
by  Director.  The  type  of  the  family  did  not  indicate  the  posses- 
sion of  any  running  blood.  Tom  Rolfe  put  four  trotters  and 
three  pacers,  all  with  fast  records,  into  the  2:30  list,  and  three 
of  his  sons  left  twenty-nine  performers.  In  the  latter  years  of 
his  life  he  was  sold  by  Mr.  Woodmansee  to  Mr.  Wesley  P.  Balch, 
of  Boston,  and  died  1877. 

YOUNG  ROLFE  was  the  best  son  of  Tom  Rolfe.  He  was  a  bay, 
foaled  1876,  and  came  out  of  Judith,  by  Draco,  son  of  Young 
Merrill,  and  she  out  of  Lady  Balch,  by  Rising  Sun.  He  was  bred 
by  Wesley  P.  Balch,  passed  to  C.  H.  Nelson,  of  Maine,  then  back 
to  John  Sheppard  of  Boston,  and  died  1884,  when  only  eight 
years-  old.  He  was  one  of  the-  best  horses  of  his  day,  as  a  race 
horse,  and  his  early  death  was  universally  considered  a  great  loss 
to  the  breeding  interests  of  the  country.  He  has  to  his  credit 
nine  representative  trotters  in  the  2:30  list. 

NELSON,  the  great  son  of  Young  Rolfe,  was  bred  and  owned  by 
C.  H.  Nelson,  Waterville,  Maine.  He  is  a  bay  horse,  foaled  1882, 
and  out  of  Gretchen,  the  daughter  of  Gideon,  by  Hambletonian, 
10,  and  she  out  of  the  fast  trotting  mare  Kate,  by  Vermont  Black 
Hawk.  This  horse  Gideon,  the  son  of  Hambletonian,  was,  like  his 
.sire,  very  strongly  inbred  to  old  Messenger,  tracing  through  mares 
T>y  Young  Engineer  and  Young  Commander,  both  grandsons  of 
Messenger,  to  the  William  Hunter  mare,  that  was  by  Messenger 
himself.  When  the  pedigree  of  Nelson  is  compared  with  the 
pedigree  of  Hambletonian,  according  to  the  rules  of  arithmetic, 
it  may  be  found  to  contain  nearly  or  quite  as  much  Messenger 
blood  as  Hambletonian  possessed,  but,  unfortunately,  we  know 
nothing  of  the  trotting  capacity  of  the  intervening  mares.  If 
we  had  a  "One  Eye"  and  a  "Charles  Kent  Mare"  coming  next 
to  the  William  Hunter  mare,  we  would  have  much  greater  ex- 
pectations. But,  as  it  is,  when  we  consider  the  superlative 
capacity  of  Nelson  himself,  with  his  record  of  2:09,  and  his  nine- 
teen trotters  and  seven  pacers  already  to  his  credit,  it  is  probable 
he  will  found  a  large  and  valuable  family. 

Through  his  son  Blanco,  sire  of  Smuggler,  we  have  another 
notable  line  to  Irons'  Cadmus.  Smuggler  was  in  his  day  the 
champion  trotting  stallion,  taking  a  record  of  2:15^  when  owned 
T)y  Colonel  Russell,  of  Boston,  and  driven  by  Charles  Marvin, 
who  after  long  and  painstaking  efforts  converted  him  from  his 


358  THE    HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

natural  gait,  the  pace,  to  the  trot.  Wearing  twenty-four  ounces  on 
each  fore-foot  to  keep  him  at  the  trot,  Smuggler  defeated  all 
the  best  horses  of  his  day,  including  Goldsmith  Maid.  He  was 
by  Blanco,  out  of  a  pacing  mare  of  unknown  blood.  As  might 
have  been  expected,  he  failed  to  found  a  great  family,  though 
fourteen  of  his  get  are  standard  performers,  and  twelve  of  his 
sons  and  seventeen  of  his  daughters  have  produced  thirty-eight 
performers. 

TOM  HAL. — The  original  Tom  Hal  was  taken  to  Kentucky,  as 
early,  probably,  as  1824,  and  as  was  the  custom  in  those  days,  he 
was  called  a  Canadian,  like  all  other  pacing  horses.  The  tradition 
is  that  Dr.  Boswell  got  him  in  Philadelphia  and  rode  him  home 
to  Lexington,  Kentucky.  Another  statement  is  that  he  was  taken 
to  Kentucky  by  John  T.  Mason,  and  this  statement  appears  in  the 
advertisement  of  the  horse  for  the  year  1828.  As  the  horse  was 
in  the  hands  of  William  L.  Breckenridge  that  year,  and  as  his 
advertisement  was  practically  a  contemporaneous  record,  we 
must  give  the  preference  to  the  Mason  representation.  He  was 
a  roan  horse,  as  I  understand,  a  little  over  fifteen  hands  high,  stout 
and  stylish.  He  was  very  smooth  and  pleasant  in  his  gait  and  a 
very  fast  pacer.  He  was  for  some  time  in  the  hands  of  Captain 
West,  of  Georgetown,  Kentucky,  and  then  passed  to  Benjamin  X. 
Shropshire,  of  Harrison  County,  and  after  some  years  he  died  his 
property. 

BALD  STOCKINGS,  also  known  as  Lail's  Tom  Hal,  was  a  chest- 
nut horse  with  a  bald  face  and  four  white  legs.  He  was  foaled 
early  in  the  "forties,"  and  was  got  by  the  original  Tom  Hal,  and 
his  dam  was  by  Chinn's  Copperbottom.  He  was  bred  by  Hig- 
gins  Chinn,  Harrison  County,  kept  for  a  time  by  John  Lucas, 
and  owned  by  Mr.  Lail,  of  the  same  county.  He  was  one  of  the 
prominent  links  between  the  old  and  the  new,  and  was  a  fast 
pacer. 

SORREL  TOM  was  a  son  of  Bald  Stockings  (Lail's  Tom  Hal)  and 
bore  the  same  color  and  markings.  He  was  bred  and  owned  by 
John  Shawhan,  of  Harrison  County,  Kentucky.  His  dam  was  a 
grey  mare  from  Ohio,  of  unknown  breeding.  He  was  kept  at 
Falmouth,  Indiana,  the  seasons  of  1857  and  1858,  and  was  very 
widely  known  in  that  region  as  "Shawhan's  Tom  Hal."  He  was 
quite  a  large  horse,  and  to  take  the  description  as  given  him, 
"he  could  pace  like  the  wind."  He  was  then  taken  back  to 
Kentucky,  leaving  a  multitude  of  good  colts  behind  him,  among; 


THE   BLUE   BULL   AND   OTHER   MINOR   FAMILIES.  359 

them  the  famous  pacing  gelding,  Hoosier  Tom,  2:19^.  One  of 
his  Indiana  sons  passed  into  the  hands  of  William  Gray,  of  Rush 
County,  Indiana,  and  became  known  as  Gray^s  Tom  Hal.  Noth- 
ing is  known  of  the  dam  of  this  horse.  He  was  the  sire  of  Little 
Gipsey,  trotter,  2:22,  and  Limber  Jack,  pacer,  2:18£,  besides  six 
daughters  that  produced  nine  performers. 

About  1863-4  Mr.  Shropshire,  Jr.,  a  son  of  the  owner  of  the 
original  Tom  Hal,  brought  a  little  roan  Tom  Hal  horse  to  Rush- 
ville,  Indiana,  where  he  stood  a  number  of  years  and  was  known 
as  Shropshire's  Tom  Hal.  This  horse  was  probably  by  Lail's 
Tom  Hal,  as  he  was  too  young  to  be  by  the  original  of  the  name. 
He  was  a  fast  pacer,  but  nothing  is  known  of  his  progeny  or  his- 
tory. The  locating  of  this  Indiana  branch  of  the  family  is  of 
particular  interest,  for.it  shows  a  concentration  of  pacing  blood 
that  was  doubtless  a  strong  reinforcement  to  Blue  Bull. 

TOM  HAL  (KITTRELL'S)  was  a  large  bay  horse  and  a  pacer, 
bought  by  Major  M.  B.  Kittrell  in  1850  of  Simeon  Kirtly,  near 
Centerville,  Bourbon  County,  Kentucky,  and  taken  to  Middle 
Tennessee.  His  sire  was  represented  to  have  been  a  large  pac- 
ing bay  horse  that  was  brought  from  Canada,  thereby  implying 
that  he  was  the  original  of  the  name,  brought  to  Kentucky. 
While  it  is  possible  that  the  original  Mason  horse  may  have  been 
the  sire  of  Major  KittrelPs  horse,  the  size  and  color  of  that  horse 
do  not  correspond  with  what  has  been  accepted  as  facts.  It  is 
altogether  more  probable  that  the  sire  of  the  Tennessee  horse  was  a 
son  of  the  original  Tom  Hal,  as  the  roan  color  seems  to  be 
strongly  fixed  in  all  branches  of  the  family. 

TOM  HAL  JR.  (GIBSON'S)  was  a  roan  horse,  foaled  1860.  Got 
by  Kittrell's  Tom  Hal;  dam  (bred  by  John  Leonard),  by  Adam's 
Stump,  pacer;  grandam  said  to  be  by  Cummings'  Whip,  pacer. 
Bred  by  H.  C.  Saunders,  Nashville,  Tennessee;  kept  a  number 
of  years  by  T.  D.  Moore,  Petersburg,  Tennessee,  afterward 
owned  by  Polk  Bros,  and  Major  Campbell  Brown,  of  Springhill, 
Tennessee.  Adams'  Stump  was  a  roan  horse  and  a  fast  pacer 
and  he  was  not  only  the  sire  of  Julia  Johnson,  the  dam  of  this 
horse,  but  also  of  the  dam  of  Bonesetter.  He  died  of  old  age, 
July,  1890.  The  strong  concentration  of  pacing  blood  in  his 
veins  gave  him  unusual  power  in  transmitting  his  inherited  habit 
of  action.  He  put  fourteen  representatives  in  the  2:30  list,  and 
what  is  unprecedented,  they  are  all  pacers. 

BROWX  HAL  is  a  brown  horse,   as  his  name  indicates,  foaled 


360  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

1879,  got  by  Gibson's  Torn  Hal;  dam  the  pacing  mare  Lizzie,  the 
dam  of  the  pacer  Little  Brown  Jug,  by  John  Netherland,  son  of 
Henry  Hal;  grandam  Blackie,  by  John  Hal,  son  of  John  Eaton; 
great-grandam  Old  March,  by  Young  Conqueror.  Bred  by  R. 
H.  Moore,  Oulleoka,  Tennessee,  passed  to  M.  C.  Campbell  and 
Campbell  Brown,  Springhill,  Tennessee.  Here  we  have  a  still 
stronger  intensification  of  the  pacing  instinct,  for  this  horse  not 
only  has  a  pacing  record  himself  of  2:12-^,  but  he  put  twenty  of 
his  progeny  into  the  standard  list,  and  all  of  them  pacers.  It  is 
not  shown  by  the  Year  Book  that  either  this  horse  or  his  sire  has 
any  trotters  to  his  credit,  but  it  can  hardly  be  doubted  that  some 
of  their  progeny  took  naturally  to  the  diagonal  trot,  and  not 
showing  encouraging  speed,  were  never  developed. 

If  the  question  were  asked,  "What  is- to  result  from  this  in- 
tensely pacing  family?"  it  would  be  very  difficult  to  frame  a  satis- 
factory answer.  At  present  this  family  shows  all  the  vigor  of 
youth  in  its  new  development,  but,  judging  by  others  that  have 
come  and  gone,  it  too,  in  its  turn,  will  be  submerged  in  more 
prepotent  strains,  that  will  more  nearly  meet  the  wants  of  their 
masters.  The  pacer  has  been  lifted  from  obscurity  and  made  the 
equal  of  the  trotter  as  a  race  horse;  his  blood  has  contributed  to 
an  unknown  extent  in  giving  speed  to  the  trotter,  but  he  must  be 
as  good  a  horse  for  all  uses  as  the  trotter,  or  nobody  will  want  him. 

KENTUCKY  HUNTER,  the  head  of  the  family  bearing  this  nama 
that,  at  one  time,  was  very  prominent  in  Central  New  York, 
was  foaled  1822,  and  was  bred  by  Louis  Sherrill  of  New  Hart- 
ford, New  York,  and  was  got  by  Watkins'  Highlander.  His 
dam  was  a  mare  bought  from  a  couple  of  dealers  who  were  pass- 
ing through  New  Hartford  with  some  six  or  seven  horses  for 
sale,  and  they  represented  this  mare  to  have  been  brought  from 
Kentucky.  On  this  representation  she  was  called  "a  Kentucky 
mare."  She  was  a  fine  saddle  mare  and  for  this  reason  she  was 
used  chiefly  for  that  service.  From  her  superiority  as  a  saddler, 
I  think  it  is  safe  to  conclude  she  was  a  pacer  and  could  go  the 
saddle  gaits.  Kentucky  Hunter  was  a  chestnut  horse,  a  little 
above  medium  size.  Mr.  Sherrill  sold  him  when  young  to 
Messrs.  Bagg  and  Goodrich  who  kept  him  two  years  and  sold  him 
to  William  Ferguson,  of  Oriskany  Falls,  New  York,  and  Mr. 
Ferguson  continued  to  own  him  till  he  died  in  1838. 

During  the  lifetime  of  this  horse  the  pacing  gait  was  considered 


THE   BLUE   BULL   AND   OTHER   MINOR   FAMILIES.  361 

an  evidence  of  bad  breeding,  and  this  prejudice  has  continued  for 
many  years.  The  saddle  was  going  out  of  use  and  wheels  were 
coming  in.  After  Flora  Temple  electrified  the  trotting  world, 
writers  had  a  great  deal  to  say  of  her  origin  and  family,  but  no 
one  ever  intimated  that  her  grandsire  was  a  pacer.  From  sources 
that  I  have  no  reason  to  doubt,  I  have  been  informed  he  was  not 
only  a  pacer,  but  a  fast  pacer.  This  habit  of  action  was  not 
popular  with  breeders,  and  Mr.  Ferguson  kept  it  concealed  as 
much  as  possible.  When  the  pacer,  Oneida  Chief,  from  his  own 
loins,  was  beating  Lady  Suffolk,  three  miles  in  7:44,  to  saddle, 
and  many  of  the  other  cracks  of  that  day,  his  sire  was  dead  and 
nothing  was  then  to  be  made  by  proclaiming  from  the  housetops 
that  Oneida  Chief  was  by  old  Kentucky  Hunter. 

Very  little  is  known  of  Watkins'  Highlander,  the  sire  of  this 
horse.  He  was  brought  to  Whitestown,  New  York,  1821,  by 
Julius  Watkins,  from  Connecticut.  Some  of  the  older  men  who 
knew  the  horse  insist  that  Mr.  Watkins  represented  him  to  be 
by  a  son  of  imported  Messenger,  and  out  of  Nancy  Dawson  by 
imported  Brown  Highlander.  This  is  possible,  indeed  probable, 
but  it  is  not  established. 

BOGUS  HUNTER  was  one  of  the  younger  sons  of  Kentucky 
Hunter.  He  was  a  chestnut  horse  of  good  size  and  came  out  of 
a  mare  by  Bogus.  But  little  is  known  of  this  horse,  and  that 
little  is  rendered  still  more  uncertain  by  the  unreliable  character 
of  his  owners,  the  Loomis  brothers,  of  Sangerfield,  New  York. 
It  is  certain,  however,  that  a  horse  owned  by  the  Loomises  and 
called  by  this  name  was  the  sire  of  the  famous  world  beater, 
Flora  Temple.  This  fact  rests  upon  the  testimony  of  Mr. 
Samuel  Welch,  a  reputable  and  trustworthy  man  who  owned  the 
dam  of  Flora  and  had  her  coupled  with  this  horse,  under  his  own 
eye. 

EDWIN  FORREST,  the  most  prominent  representative  of  this 
family,  was  a  large  and  rather  loosely  made  bay  horse,  foaled 
1851,  got  by  Young  Bay  Kentucky  Hunter,  son  of  Bay  Kentucky 
Hunter,  that  was  by  the  original  Kentucky  Hunter.  His  dam, 
Doll,  bred  by  Mrs.  Crane,  of  Whitestown,  Oneida  County,  New 
York,  was  by  Watkins'  Highlander;  grandam  a  chestnut  mare 
owned  in  the  Crane  family,  by  Black  Eiver  Messenger,  son  of 
Ogden's  Messenger.  The  identification  of  this  grandson  of  im- 
ported Messenger  was  secured  after  the  appearance  of  the  fifth 
volume  of  the  "Register."  This  same  mare,  Doll,  the  next  year 


362  THE    HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

produced  Wamock's  Highland  Messenger,  that  was  taken  to  Ken- 
tucky, and  was  a  valuable  element  in  the  road-horse  blood  of  that 
State.  Edwin  Forrest  was  bred  by  Barnes  Davis,  Oneida,  Madison 
County;  owned  two  years  by  H.  L.  Barker,  of  Clinton,  New 
York,  sold  to  Marcus  Downing,  of  Kentucky,  by  him  to  Wood- 
burn  Farm,  and  after  a  time  he  passed  to  a  company  at  Keokuk, 
Iowa,  and  then  to  George  W.  Ferguson,  of  Marshalltown,  Iowa, 
where  he  was  burned  up  in  1874. 

It  has  been  said  this  horse  was  a  pacer  and  converted  to  a  trot- 
ter, but  this  does  not  seem  to  be  sustained  by  the  facts.  He  was 
shown  as  a  three-year-old  at  the  Oneida  County  Fair,  and  he  was 
then  a  square  natural  trotter  and  was  considered  very  fast,  for 
he  was  fully  able  to  distance  all  the  other  colts  of  his  age.  The 
story  of  his  being  a  pacer  probably  grew  out  of  the  fact  that 
there  was  a  strong  pacing  strain  in  the  family,  as  the  original 
Kentucky  Hunter  was  undoubtedly  a  pacer.  Many  of  the  Ken- 
tucky Hunters  were  speedy  travelers  and  a  few  of  them  were 
fast.  Black  River  Messenger  was  a  horse  of  very  wide  local 
reputation  for  the  superiority  of  his  progeny  as  rapid  travelers. 
The  union  of  the  Messenger  blood  with  pacing  blood  produced 
excellent  results  in  this,  as  well  as  in  thousands  of  other  cases. 
As  was  the  common  usage  before  the  establishment  of  the  "Trot- 
ting Register,"  this  horse  was  advertised  with  two  fictitious  crosses 
added  to  his  pedigree — his  grandam  was  given  as  by  Duroc,  and 
his  great-grandam  as  by  imported  Messenger.  Only  two  from 
his  loins  were  able  to  enter  the  2:30  list;  six  of  his  sons  got  seven 
performers  and  twelve  of  his  daughters  produced  fifteen  trotters. 

SKENA^DOAH  (afterward  called  Kentucky  Hunter)  was  a  bay 
horse,  foaled  1854,  got  by  Brokenlegged  Hunter,  son  of  the  orig- 
inal Kentucky  Hunter;  dam  not  clearly  established.  He  was 
bred  by  Mr.  Sykes,  near  Canastota,  and  passed  through  several 
hands  to  Henry  Dewey,  of  Morrisville,  New  York,  who  trotted 
him  in  a  number  of  races  in  Central  New  York  and  then  took 
him  to  California,  where  he  was  kept  in  the  stud  a  number  of 
years  under  the  name  of  Kentucky  Hunter,  and  died  there  1871. 
He  got  one  trotter;  one  son  that  left  two  performers  and  seven 
daughters  that  left  nine  performers. 

DREW  HORSE,  commonly  called  "Old  Drew,"  was  a  brown  bay 
horse,  foaled  1842,  and  was  about  fifteen  and  one-quarter  hands 
high  and  well-formed.  He  was  bred,  or  rather  raised,  by  Hiram 


THE   BLUE   BULL   AND   OTHER   MINOR   FAMILIES.  363 

Drew,  then  of  Exeter,  Maine,  who  kept  him  all  his  life.  The 
story  of  his  supposed  sire  was  one  of  those  weakly  devised  fictions, 
.so  common  in  that  day,  and  especially  where  the  Canadian  border 
could  be  made  effective  in  rounding  it  out.  To  show  that  the 
mysterious  colt  that  became  the  sire  of  Drew  Horse  was  "thor- 
oughbred/' the  stereotyped  "British  Army  officer"  is  made 
available,  for  the  hundredth  time,  as  having  brought  a  mare 
from  England  in  foal  to  a  thoroughbred  horse,  the  foal  was 
dropped  and  at  three  years  old  he  was  traded  by  the  aforesaid 
"officer"  to  the  party  that  brought  the  colt  to  Maine.  Unfor- 
tunately for  the  story,  the  party  who  made  the  trade  and  the 
;story  had  a  bad  memory,  an,d  sometimes  he  located  the  trade  at 
St.  Johns  and  sometimes  at  Fredericton,  New  Brunswick.  But 
the  fiction  served  its  generation  and  was  not  exposed  till  long 
after  the  Drew  Horse  was  dead.  The  facts  in  the  matter  seem 
to  be  simply  these:  a  stallion  colt  was  running  in  a  pasture  ad- 
joining Mr.  Drew's  pasture,  and  that  colt  got  over  the  fence,  was 
found  with  Mr.  Drew's  mare,  and  in  due  time  she  dropped  the 
colt  known  as  the  "Drew  Horse."  The  fence-breaker  was  soon 
.after  made  a  gelding  and  sold,  and  nothing  is  known  of  him, 
either  before  or  after  this  escapade.  The  dam  of  .the  Drew 
Horse  was  a  bay  mare  about  fifteen  and  one-half  hands  high, 
foaled  about  1836,  and  bred  by  Mark  Pease,  of  Jackson,  Maine. 
Her  sire  was  called  Sir  Henry  and  was  represented  to  be  by  a  son 
of  American  Eclipse,  that  was  taken  to  Maine  from  Connecticut 
by  Dr.  Brewster  and  sold  to  General  F.  W.  Lander.  She  was 
known  as  Grace  Darling  and  afterward  as  Boston  Girl.  She  was 
•on  the  turf  and  was  quite  a  trotter,  and  it  is  claimed  she  made  a 
record  of  2:37,  and  her  dam  was  Lady  Jane  by  Winthrop  Mes- 
.senger.  While  I  don't  know  what  the  inheritance  of  this  horse 
was  on  the  side  of  his  sire,  I  do  know  that  he  had  a  trotting 
inheritance  on  the  side  of  his  dam.  He  lived  till  1866  and  then 
had  to  be  destroyed  on  account  of  a  broken  leg. 

This  horse  was  never  trained,  and  it  is  not  known  what  he 
might  have  been  able  to  do  as  a  trotter.  He  put  two  of  his  sons 
in  the  2:30  list,  Dirigo  and  General  McClellan.  Of  his  sons,  two 
put  five  trotters  and  three  pacers  in  the  list,  and  of  his  daughters 
left  six  representatives  there.  Besides  these  he  left  a  number  of 
others  with  records  a  little  short  of  the  limit  of  speed,  and  many 
without  records  that  were  fast  and  very  game  roadsters. 

DIRIGO,  at  first  called  George  B.  McClellan,  under  which  name 


364  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

he  made  his  record,  was  the  best  son  of  Drew  Horse.  He  was  a 
brown  horse,  and  in  appearance  much  like  his  sire.  He  was 
foaled  1856  and  came  out  of  a  mare  that  has  not  been  traced,  but 
was  doubtless  a  pacing  mare.  He  was  bred  by  Horace  MeKinney, 
Monroe,  Maine,  and  passed  to  David  Quimby,  of  Corinna,  Maine, 
and  died  1884.  He  made  his  record  of  2:29  in  a  single  heat  and 
never  was  on  the  track  again.  Four  trotters  and  two  pacers  by 
him  entered  the  2:30  list.  Two  of  his  sons  became  the  sires  of 
three  trotters,  and  five  of  his  daughters  each  produced  a  per- 
former. He  left  others  with  and  without  records  that  were  fast 
and  stylish  drivers. 

HIRAM  DREW,  at  first  called  Bay  Morgan,  was  a  son  of  Old 
Drew,  and  his  dam  was  a  small  bay  mare,  owned  near  Bangor  and 
said  to  be  of  Morgan  blood.  This  horse  was  on  the  turf  some 
years  and  was  engaged  in  some  locally  important  contests,  but 
never  was  able  to  make  himself  standard  either  by  his  own  or  the 
performances  of  his  progeny.  His  best  performance,  I  believe,  ' 
was  2:3H. 

WINTHROP  was  a  bay  horse,  foaled  1864,  got  by  Drew  Horse; 
dam  by  the  Eton  Horse  and  grandam  by  Stone  or  Simpson's  Mes- 
senger. He  was  bred  by  E.  J.  Greene,  Newport,  Maine;  taken 
to  California  1870,  and  there  owned  by  Judge  W.  E.  Greens  and 
L.  E.  Yates,  of  Stockton.  It  does  not  appear  that  he  ever  was 
trained,  and  consequently  has  no  record.  His  opportunities, 
probably,  were  not  very  great,  but  whether  or  not,  he  was  not 
successful  in  the  stud.  He  left  one  trotter  and  one  pacer  and 
the  dams  of  one  trotter  and  one  pacer. 

This  family  never  was  large,  and  its  popularity  was  up  and 
down  just  as  a  few  individuals  might  be  successful  or  unsuccess- 
ful on  the  turf.  To  start  with,  it  had  a  very  weak  inheritance 
of  trotting  instinct,  and  that  weakness  did  not  strengthen  in  suc- 
ceeding generations.  Of  late  years  it  has  failed  to  maintain 
itself  as  a  trotting  family,  and  is  now  practically  out  of  the- 
reckoning  of  trotters. 

HIATOGA,  generally  known  as  Eice's  Hiatoga,  was  a  bay  pac- 
ing horse  and  was  bred  in  Rockingham  County,  Virginia,  and 
taken  to  Fairfield  County,  Ohio,  by  Edward  Rice,  some  time  about 
1836.  He  had  the  reputation  of  being  a  fast  pacer,  and  was  sold 
to  William  Shiruo,  of  the  same  county,  and  by  him  to  William 
Munger,  in  whose  possession  he  died.  He  was  got  by  a  horse 


THE  BtUE  BULL  AND  OTHER  MINOR  FAMILIES.      365 

known  in  Virginia  as  Hiatoga,  and  also  American  Hiatoga,  but 
nothing  is  known  of  the  blood  of  his  dam.  Nothing  is  known  of 
his  speed  or  his  progeny  except  through  the  two  sons  here  given. 

Hiatoga,  generally  designated  as  "Old  Togue,"'  was  got  by 
Rice's  Hiatoga;  dam  by  Thunderbolt,  grandam  by  Black  or  Bold 
Rover.  He  was  foaled  1843  and  was  bred  by  David  W.  Brown,  of 
Perry  County,  Ohio;  sold  1849  to  John  Joseph,  Kirkersville, 
Ohio,  where  he  made  some  seasons  and  was  sold  1855  to  Alvah 
Perry,  Lancaster,  where  he  remained  till  1863,  and  was  sold  to 
Harvey  Wilson,  and  two  years  later  to  William  McDonald, 
Columbus,  Ohio,  where  he  died  1871.  This  horse  left  excellent 
stock  and  many  of  them  fast  pacers,  but  they  never  cut  much 
figure  on  the  turf. 

HI*ATOGA  (HAXLEY'S)  was  a  bay  pacing  horse  of  good  size  and 
-quality  and  was  very  popular  as  a  sire.  He  was  foaled  1849,  got 
by  Rice's  Hiatoga;  dam  an  elegant  bay  mare  sixteen  hands  high 
.and  represented  to  be  of  "Sir  Peter  and  Eclipse  blood/'  This 
mare  was  formerly  given  as  byFiretail,  but  the  present  rendering, 
whatever  it  may  mean,  comes  from  sources  with  opportunities 
to  know.  He  was  bred  by  John  Bright,  of  Fairfield  County,  sold 
to  Joseph  Watt,  and  taken  to  Harrison  County  and  then  to  Jeffer- 
son County,  and  sold  to  James  Davis  Tweed.  He  next  passed 
through  the  hands  of  David  Rittenhouse  and  Moses  Hanley,  of 
Hopedale,  Ohio,  and  after  three  or  four  years  in  the  stud  Mr. 
Hanley  sold  him  to  David  Rittenhouse,  John  Wiley  and  Samuel 
Hanley  for  two  thousand  five  hundred  dollars,  and  he  died  the 
property  of  Mr.  Rittenhouse  near  Hopedale,  Ohio,  1858.  Two 
of  his  progeny  entered  the  2:30  list;  three  of  his  sons  left  thir- 
teen performers,  and  three  daughters  produced  five. 

HIATOGA  (SCOTT'S)  was  a  bay  pacer  foaled  1858,  got  by  Han- 
ley's  Hiatoga;  dam  by  Blind  Tuckahoe  (pacer);  grandam  by  Con- 
sul. This  horse  was  quite  fast  and  paced  under  the  name  of 
Tuscarawas  Chief.  He  was  the  best  of  the  family  and  was  bred 
.and  owned  by  Samuel  Scott,  East  Springfield,  Jefferson  County, 
Ohio.  He  put  five  trotters  and  four  pacers  in  the  2:30  list;  seven 
of  his  sons  and  seventeen  of  his  daughters  were  producers. 

The  Hiatoga  family  seems  to  have  no  trotting  inheritance  ex- 
cept from  the  pacer.  It  is  a  useful  family  and  still  has  vitality. 


CHAPTEK  XXVII. 

THE    BLACK    HAWK    OR    MORGAN    FAMILY. 

Characteristics  of  the  Morgans — History  of  the  original  Morgan — The  fabled 
pedigree — The  true  Briton  theory — Justin  Morgan's  breeding  hopelessly 
unknown — Sherman  Morgan — Black  Hawk — His  disputed  paternity — His- 
dam  called  a  Narragansett — Ethan  Allen — His  great  beauty,  speed  and 
popularity — The  Flying  Morgan  claim  baseless — His  dam  of  unknown, 
blood — His  great  race  with  Dexter — Daniel  Lambert,  the  only  successful 
sire  of  the  Black  Hawk  line. 

FIFTY  years  ago  there  was  no  family  of  horses  so  popular  as 
the  "Morgans. "  They  were  carried  into  all  parts  of  the  country 
at  high  prices  and  they  gave  their  purchasers  general  satisfac- 
tion. They  were  small,  perhaps  not  averaging  over  fourteen  and 
a  half  hands  high,  but  compact,  trappy  movers  and  had  most 
excellent  dispositions.  Many  of  them  were  ideal  roadsters, 
where  speed  was  not  in  great  demand,  for  they  were  kindly, 
tractable  and  always  on  their  courage.  Many  of  them  carried 
themselves  in  excellent  style,  and  notwithstanding  their  diminu- 
tive size,  it  is  not  probable  we  will  ever  again  see  a  better  tribe  of 
every-day,  family  horses.  In  all  their  outline  and  in  every  linea- 
ment they  were  the  very  opposite  of  the  blood  horse,  and  when 
bred  on  any  strain  outside  of  their  own  family,  they  almost  uni- 
versally failed  to  impress  their  own  characteristics  on  their  pro- 
geny. This  failure  I  observed  with  deep  regret  more  than  forty 
years  ago.  The  step  could  be  extended  and  the  speed  increased 
by  crossing  with  the  long  striders,  but  in  securing  this  we  lost 
the  Morgan.  In  advance  of  their  general  distribution  they  had 
the  misfortune  to  be  heralded  as  great  trotters,  and  in  this  re- 
spect, at  least,  they  failed  of  meeting  expectations.  They  went, 
largely,  into  the  hands  of  inexperienced  men,  who  knew  nothing 
about  how  to  cultivate  speed,  and  the  little,  short,  quick  steps  of 
their  new  trotters  gave  them  all  the  sensations  of  going  fast, 
without  the  danger  incident  to  rapid  traveling.  In  regard  to  the 
matter  of  speed,  through  the  overzealous  and  not  too  conscientious- 


THE    BLACK    HAWK    OR    MORGAN    FAMILY.  367 

editors  and  others  to  say  nothing  of  the  advertisements  of  those 
who  had  them  for  sale,  they  suffered  greatly  by  too  much  praise. 
The  result  is  that  the  original  type  has  been  extinguished,  and  it 
is  doubtful  whether  a  fair  specimen  could  be  found,  even  among 
the  mountains  of  New  England.  Next  to  the  injury  which  the 
family  sustained  from  the  exaggerated  claims  of  speed  put  for- 
ward by  its  too  sanguine  friends,  there  was  another  and  even 
greater  injury  from  the  asburd  and  foolish  claims  made  for  his 
blood.  It  is  impossible  to  make  a  thinking  and  sensible  man  be- 
lieve that  a  little  hairy-legged  "nubbin"  of  a  pony,  weighing  eight 
hundred  and  fifty  pounds,  hired  for  fifteen  dollars  a  year  to  drag 
logs  together  in  a  clearing,  at  which  employment  he  was  a  great 
success,  had  the  blood  of  the  race  horse  in  his  veins.  This  was 
always  a  stumbling  block  to  my  immature  enthusiasm  for  the 
Morgan  horse.  From  an  experience  of  a  great  many  years  and 
from  the  developments  of  horse  history  during  that  time,  I  find 
the  "stumbling  block"  no  longer  worries  me,  for  it  has  rotted 
away  and  disappeared.  Although  the  family  has  ceased  to  exist 
as  a  factor  in  current  horse  history,  it  had  a  history  in  the  past; 
and,  as  a  historian,  I  must  consider  its  origin  as  well  as  the 
deeds  it  has  accomplished  or  failed  to  accomplish. 

Mr.  Justin  Morgan,  the  central  figure  in  this  investigation, 
was  born  in  West  Springfield,  1747,  where  he  married  and  lived 
till  1788,  when  he  removed  to  Randolph,  Vermont,  where  he  died, 
March,  1798.  He  was  a  reputable  citizen,  fairly  well  educated 
for  his  time,  and  taught  school  for  a  living.  He  owned  a  house 
and  lot  in  his  native  town,  where  he  kept  a  wayside  house  of  en- 
tertainment, and  during  the  early  summer  he  usually  had  a  stal- 
lion to  keep  on  the  shares.  In  the  spring  of  1785  he  had  charge 
of  the  horse  True  Briton,  or  Beautiful  Bay,  and  I  will  here 
add  that  three  years  later,  John  Morgan,  Jr.,  had  charge  of  the 
same  horse  at  Springfield,  for  the  seasons  of  1788  and  1789. 
This  John  Morgan,  Jr  ,  removed  to  Lima,  New  York,  late  in 
1790  or  early  in  1791.  Justin  had  sold  his  place  in  West  Spring- 
field to  Abner  Morgan,  on  long  payments,  and  in  the  summer  of 
1795  he  came  back  to  West  Springfield  to  collect  some  money 
that  was  due  him,  presumably  on  the  price  of  his  former  home, 
but  he  failed  to  get  money  and  took  two  colts  instead.  One  was 
a  three-year-old  gelding  and  the  other  was  a  two-year-old  bay 
colt,  entire.  He  led  the  three-year-old  with  a  halter  and  the  two- 
year-old  followed.  The  date  of  this  visit  to  the  old  home  is  the 


368  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

key  to  the  main  question  to  be  settled,  and  it  is  fixed  by  Justin 
Morgan,  Jr.,  then  a  lad  of  the  right  age  to  remember  such  things, 
and  by  Soloman  Steele  and  Judge  Griswold,  who  fix  the  date  in 
the  late  summer  of  1795.  The  horse  was  sold  and  resold  and 
sold  again,  as  a  foal  of  1793,  and  that  date  never  left  him  till  he 
died  in  1821.  I  look  upon  this  date  as  perfectly  immovable,  and 
every  attempt  that  has  been  made  to  overthrow  it  has  not  been 
based  on  any  reasonable  evidence,  nor  prompted  by  a  desire  to  get 
at  the  truth,  but  only  to  make  a  fictitious  sire  a  possibility.  This 
was  the  original  Morgan  Horse,  and  this  date  was  thoroughly 
fixed  by  Linsley,  without  knowing  that  it  upset  the  pedigree  he 
had  labored  so  hard  to  establish.  After  a  lapse  of  fifty  years  an 
attempt  was  made  to  fix  up  a  pedigree  for  the  "Original  Morgan 
Horse/'  claiming  that  he  was  got  by  True  Briton  or  Beautiful 
Bay — represented  to  be  a  great  race  nofse,  stolen  from  the  great 
race  horse  man,  Colonel  De  Lancey,  in  the  Revolutionary  War. 
I  must,  therefore,  consider,  briefly,  this  part  of  the  fiction. 

First — As  a  starting  point  in  the  pedigree,  it  is  assumed  that 
the  race-horse  in  question  was  stolen,  during  the  War  of  the  Revo- 
lution, from  James  De  Lancey,  perhaps  the  largest  and  most 
widely  known  of  all  the  colonial  horsemen  of  that  day.  He  was 
the  first  man  to  import  race  horses  into  this  colony,  and  his  name 
and  the  fame  of  his  horses  were  discussed  everywhere.  He  was 
very  rich,  in  politics  a  Tory,  and  on  the  eve  of  hostilities  he  sold 
out  every  horse  he  owned,  of  whatever  description,  went  back  to 
England  and  never  returned.  This  disposes  of  the  false  assump- 
tion that  the  sire  of  the  original  Morgan  horse  was  stolen  from 
him. 

Second — There  was  another  James  De  Lancey,  cousin  to  the 
preceding,  and  not  a  rich  man,  who  was  colonel  of  a  body  of 
Tory  cavalry  operating  in  Westchester  County  from  1777  to  the 
close  of  the  war  in  1782.  It  is  not  known  whether  he  ever  owned 
a  race  horse  in  his  life,  but  it  is  certain  he  was  a  dashing  fighter, 
arid  at  the  head  of  the  cowboys  he  was  known  to  the  inhabitants 
of  all  that  region.  His  name  is  not  to  be  found  anywhere  in  con- 
nection with  horses.  He  bore,  in  full,  the  same  name  as  the  dis- 
tinguished horseman,  and  was  mistaken  for  him,  although  he  was 
on  the  other  side  of  the  ocean. 

Third — It  is  claimed  that  "one  Smith"  stole  the  horse  in 
question  from  Colonel  De  Lancey  and  sold  him  to  Mr.  Ward,  of 
Hartford,  Connecticut,  who  kept  him  a  few  years  and  sold  him 


THE    BLACK    HAWK    OK   MORGAX    FAMILY.  369 

to  Selah  Norton,  of  the  same  place,  and  remained  his  till  he  died. 
Who  was  this  "one  Smith"  and  where  did  be  belong?  Where  is 
the  evidence  that  this  "one  Smith'"  stole  a  horse  from  Colonel 
De  Lancey? 

Fourth— In  the  New  York  Packet,  then  published  at  Fishkill, 
tinder  date  of  October  19,  1780,  we  find  the  following:  "Last 
week  Lieutenant  Wright  Carpenter  and  two  others  went  down 
to  Colonel  James  De  Lancey's  quarters  and  lay  in  wait  for  his 
appearance.  He  accordingly  came  and  having  tied  his  horse  at 
the  door,  went  into  the  house;  upon  which  Carpenter  seized  the 
horse  and  mounted.  When  De  Lancey  discovered  him,  he  im 
mediately  alarmed  his  men,  who  pursued  him  to  White  Plains, 
but  in  vain,"  etc.,  etc.  This  Lieutenant  Carpenter  was  a  dash- 
ing young  fellow  and  was  promoted  next  month  to  the  position 
of  first  lieutenant  in  Captain  Lyons'  company,  of  the  Second 
Regiment  of  New  York  Militia,  of  Westchester  County,  and  still 
commanded  by  Colonel  Thomas.  This  is  the  m?n  who  stole  the 
horse,  this  is  the  contemporaneous  evidence  of  it,  and  "one 
Smith"  had  nothing  to  do  with  it. 

In  these  four  points  we  have  what  may  be  considered  the  first 
chapter  of  this  investigation  and,  as  will  be  readily  seen,  each  of 
them  must  be  fatal  to  the  pretentious  claim  that  has  been  main- 
tained for  about  a  hundred  years.  Avoiding  all  circumlocution, 
I  think  it  is  safe  to  say  that  this  so-called  pedigree  did  not  orig- 
inate this  side  of  Hartford.  The  Second  Regiment  of  New  York 
Militia,  called  "The  Skinners,"  was  made  up  of  Westchester 
County  men,  and  as  Colonel  De  Lancey  had  been  sheriff  of  that 
county,  everybody  knew  him  and  knew  that  he  was  not  the  race 
horse  James.  We  must,  therefore,  look  further  on  for  the  time 
when  and  the  person  by  whom  this  pedigree  was  manufactured. 

In  1784  this  horse  was  advertised  at  Lanesboro,  Massachusetts, 
tinder  the  name  of  Beautiful  Bay,  and  no  attempt  was  made  to 
give  a  pedigree  or  origin  of  the  horse. 

In  1785  he  was  at  West  Springfield,  Massachusetts,  in  charge 
of  Justin  Morgan,  still  called  Beautiful  Bay,  and  still  no  pedi- 
gree. 

In  1788  and  1789  he  was  in  charge  of  John  Morgan,  Jr.,  of 
Springfield,  Massachusetts,  and  here,  for  the  first  time,  he  is 
designated  as  "the  famous  full-blooded  English  horse,  called 
True  Briton  or  Beautiful  Bay,"  but  no  pedigree  is  given. 

In  1791  he  was  advertised  at  East  Hartford,  Connecticut,  by 


370  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

his  owner,  Selah  Norton,  and  his  pedigree  is  here  given  for  the-- 
first  time  as  follows:  "True  Briton,  or  Beautiful  Bay,  got  by  im- 
ported Traveler,  dam  De  Lancey's  racer."  After  advertising  the 
horse  for  seven  years  without  a  pedigree,  at  last  Mr.  Selah  Nor- 
ton manufactures  one  and  gives  it  over  his  own  signature. 

In  1793  he  is  again  called  Beautiful  Bay,  but  no  pedigree,  at 
South  Hadley,  Massachusetts. 

In  1794  and  1795  he  was  kept  at  Ashfield,  Massachusetts,  by 
Mr.  Norton  himself,  and  called  Traveler,  and  his  pedigree  is 
again  given  in  amended  form  as  follows:  "Sired  by  the  famous 
old  Traveler,  imported  from  Ireland,  dam  Colonel  De  Lancey's 
imported  racer." 

This  is  the  last  trace  we  have  of  the  horse  Beautiful  Bay,  for 
that  seems  to  be  his  honest  name,  and  now  I  must  ask  some 
questions.  These  advertisements  cover  a  period  of  eleven  years 
and  they  are  worthy  of  careful  study.  From  1784  to  1791  there 
is  no  attempt  at  giving  any  pedigree  at  all.  With  the  exception 
of  three  seasons  he  seems  to  have  been  let,  probably  on  shares,  to 
different  keepers,  in  different  parts  of  the  country.  From  first 
to  last  Selah  Norton  seems  to  have  been  his  owner.  If  he  had 
received  the  pedigree,  and  the  romantic  story  of  his  theft,  from 
"one  Smith,77  as  claimed,  is  it  conceivable  that  he  would  have 
concealed  that  story  from  the  public  when  it  would  have  added 
so  much  to  the  patronage  of  his  horse?  How  does  it  come  that 
not  a  single  man  having  this  stallion  in  charge,  except  Selah 
Norton  himself,  ever  gave  his  pedigree?  "What  prompted  Selah 
Norton  to  withdraw  the  horse  from  public  service,  in  Hartford, 
immediately  after  he  first  gave  his  pedigree?  Was  it  because^ 
everybody  there  knew  it  was  a  fraud?  When  the  horse  was  taken 
to  South  Hadley  in  1793,  why  did  his  keeper  there  refuse  to 
accept  either  the  name  True  Briton  or  the  new  pedigree?  It  will 
be  observed  he  was  advertised  there  simply  as  Beautiful  Bay  and 
no  pedigree  given.  The  next  two  years  we  find  him  at  Ashfield, 
Massachusetts,  to  which  point  it  would  seem  his  owner  had  re- 
moved from  Hartford,  For  some  reason  that  can  be  better 
imagined  than  explained,  the  names  Beautiful  Bay  and  True 
Briton  are  there  dropped  and  he  is  rechristened  as  Traveler.  To 
this  change  of  name  the  old  pedigree  is  attached,  with  a  very 
important  change  in  that  also,  as  follows:  "Sired  by  famous  old 
Traveler,  imported  from  Ireland,  dam  Colonel  De  Lancey's  im- 
ported racer.'7  These  three  words,  "imported  from  Ireland,7'" 


THE    BLACK    HAWK    OB   MOKGAN"    FAMILY.  371 

are  very  important  in  two  particulars,  for  they  not  only  knock 
out  the  "featherheads"  who  have  been  always  maintaining  that 
the  imported  Traveler  meant  Lloyd's  Traveler  of  New  Jersey, 
son  of  Morton's  Traveler,  that  was  imported  from  Yorkshire  into 
Virginia  about  1750,  but  it  convicts  Selah  Norton  of  inventing 
this  pedigree,  for  there  was  no  such  horse  brought  from  Ireland. 
It  is  certainly  unnecessary  to  say  another  word  in  illustration  of 
Selah  Norton's  character.  When  we  study  these  advertisements 
it  becomes  as  clear  as  the  light  of  day  that  nobody  believed  him 
or  the  story  that  "one  Smith"  stole  the  horse  from  Colonel  De 
Lancey.  The  crimes  of  horse  stealing  and  desertion  were  ex- 
ceedingly common  during  the  period  of  the  revolution  and  it  is 
quite  possible  that  "one  Smith"  may  have  stolen  a  horse  out  of 
somebody's  stable  and  sold  him  to  Mr.  Ward  or  Mr.  Norton  as 
the  same  horse  that  Lieutenant  Carpenter  stole  from  Colonel  De 
Lancey,  but  neither  "one  Smith"  nor  "one  Norton"  knew  any- 
thing more  about  his  pedigree  than  he  did  about  the  man  in  the 
moon,  and  I  will  here  end  the  second  chapter  of  this  investiga- 
tion. 

I  am  clearly  of  the  opinion  that  Justin  Morgan  was  an  honest 
man  and  that  he  would  not  tell  a  lie,  even  if  he  knew  it  might 
accrue  to  his  present  and  personal  advantage.  He  was  poor, 
feeble  in  health,  and  had  hard  scuffling  to  get  along.  As  a 
means  of  livelihood,  in  part  at  least,  it  seems  to  have  been  his 
business  for  a  good  many  years  to  keep  stallions  on  shares  for 
different  owners.  As  late  as  1795  he  had  a  horse  from  Hartford, 
Connecticut,  called  Figure,  to  which  we  will  refer  later  on.  In 
1788  he  sold  his  little  place  in  West  Springfield,  Massachusetts, 
and  removed  to  Randolph,  Vermont,  where  he  died  in  March, 
1798  In  the  autumn  of  1795  he  visited  West  Springfieid  again, 
for  the  purpose  of  collecting  some  money  that  was  still  due  him 
there,  probably  some  deferred  payments  of  his  former  home,  and 
as  he  was  not  able  to  get  the  money  he  took  two  horses  in  lieu 
thereof.  One  was  a  three-year-old  gelding,  and  the  other  was  a 
two-year-old  bay  colt,  entire.  He  led  the  gelding  beside  the 
horse  he  was  riding  and  the  colt  followed  all  the  way.  The  evi- 
dence that  fixes  the  date  of  this  trip  in  the  autumn  of  1795  and 
the  age  of  the  colt  that  followed  seems  to  me  to  be  completely 
bomb-proof.  This  evidence  not  only  embraces  the  recollections 
of  Justin  Morgan's  neighbors,  but  when  he  died  the  colt,  in  1793, 
was  sold  by  his  administrators  as  a  five-year-old.  In  all  the 


372  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

changes  of  ownership  that  took  place  through  his  life  and  at  his 
death,  in  1821,  he  was  represented  as  foaled  in  1793.  He  died 
from  the  effects  of  a  kick  that  was  neglected,  and  not  from  old 
age. 

The  only  serious  attempt  that  has  heen  made  to  controvert  the 
date  of  1793  was  that  made  in  the  name  of  John  Morgan,  of 
Lima,  New  York,  in  1842,  he  being  then  eighty  years  old,  in  the 
Albany  Cultivator.  Unfortunately  the  editor  fails  to  publish  the 
letter  he  professes  to  have  received  from  John  Morgan  and  only 
gives  his  construction  of  it,  which  any  child  knows  is  no  evidence 
at  all.  The  editor  represents  him  to  say  ''that  the  two-year-old 
stud  which  he  (Justin)  took  with  him  to  Vermont  was  sired  by  a 
horse  owned  by  Selah  Norton,  of  East  Hartford,  Connecticut, 
called  True  Briton  or  Beautiful  Bay."  Justin  Morgan  removed 
to  Randolph,  Vermont,  in  the  spring  of  1788,  and  this  John 
Morgan  removed  to  Lima,  New  York,  about  February,  1790. 
They  were  not  brothers,  but  distant  relatives.  If  John  means  to 
say  that  Justin  ''took  with  him"  when  he  removed  to  Vermont  a 
two-year-old  son  of  Beautiful  Bay,  that  colt  must  have  been 
foaled  in  1786,  which  would  make  him  twelve  years  old  instead  of 
five  when  he  was  sold  upon  the  death  of  his  owner,  and  thirty-six 
years  old  instead  of  twenty-nine  when  he  died  from  a  kick. 
Now,  if  we  concede  that  Justin  did  take  with  him  a  two-year-old 
son  of  Beautiful  Bay,  the  dates  render  it  impossible  that  he 
should  have  been  the  founder  of  the  Morgan  horse  family  and  we 
have  no  trace  of  him  whatever. 

Another  authority  has  very  recently  come  to  the  front,  and  in 
order  to  avoid  the  difficulty  of  dates  and  still  retain  the  possibil- 
ity of  the  horse  being  by  Beautiful  Bay,  insists  that  he  was  foaled 
1789  and  bred  by  Justin  Morgan  himself.  4Jnder  this  new  light 
he  was  foaled  in  Vermont  and  didn't  have  to  travel  there  at  all. 
He  insists  further  that  he  named  the  horse  Figure  and  kept  him 
in  the  stud  till  his  death  in  March,  1798,  when  the  horse  was  sold 
and  his  name  changed  to  Justin  Morgan.  It  is  true  that  Justin 
Morgan,  still  seeking  to  make  a  living,  kept  a  stallion  two  or 
three  years  owned  in  Hartford,  Connecticut,  and  advertised  him 
as  "the  famous  horse  Figure,  from  Hartford."  Now,  if  this 
horse  was  foaled  the  property  of  Justin  Morgan  and  owned  by 
him  as  long  as  he  lived,  why  should  he  advertise  him  as  "from 
Hartford?"  All  these  efforts  to  fix  dates  by  shifting  about  so  as 
to  make  it  possible  for  the  bogus  stolen  horse  to  come  in  as  a  sire, 


THE   BLACK   HAWK   OR   MORGAN   FAMILY.  373 

have  already  received  more  attention  than  their  importance  de- 
mands and  I  will  therefore  call  this  the  close  of  the  third  chapter. 

There  are  several  incidents  connected  with  the  life  of  the  colt 
of  1793  that  fixed  his  identity  and  age  upon  the  recollections  of 
the  neighbors  and  friends  of  Justin  Morgan.  Solomon  Steele, 
Evans,  Rice  and  others  who  knew  the  colt  well,  all  agree  that  the 
colt  followed  his  companion  and  playmate  from  West  Springfield 
to  Randolph  in  the  autumn  of  1795  and  that  he  was  not  then 
halter  broken.  They  all  agree  that  Evans  hired  him  for  fifteen 
dollars  a  year  to  draw  logs  in  his  clearing,  in  the  place  of  a  yoke  of 
oxen.  They  all  agree  that  Justin  Morgan  died  in  March,  1798, 
and  that  the  colt  was  then  sold  as  a  five-year-old.  The  death  was 
an  immovable  date  fixer  around  which  everything  in  connection 
with  these  events  must  be  determined.  And  when  the  horse 
died  in  1821  nobody  had  ever  doubted  that  he  was  foaled  1793. 

Justin  Morgan,  Jr.,  was  in  his  tenth  year  when  the  colt  was 
brought  home,  and  he  was  twelve  years  old  when  his  father  died. 
In  1842  Justin  Morgan,  Jr.,  in  a  communication  to  the  Albany 
Cultivator,  says:  "One  was  a  three-year-old  gelding  colt,  which 
he  led;  and  the  other  a  two-year-old  stud  colt,  which  followed  all 
the  way  from  Springfield,  The  said  two-year-old  colt  was  the 
same  that  has  since  been  known  all  over  New  England  by  the 
name  of  the  Morgan  Horse.  I  know  that  my  father  always,  while 
he  lived,  called  him  a  Dutch  horse.  I  have  a  perfect  recollection 
of  the  horse  when  my  father  owned  him  and  afterward,  and  well 
remember  that  my  father  always  spoke  of  him  as  of  the  best 
blood." 

When  he  made  these  clean-cut  and  emphatic  declarations 
Justin  Morgan,  Jr.,  was  fifty-six  years  old,  and  it  has  been  sug- 
gested that  he  was  too  young,  at  the  time,  to  have  remembered 
about  the  colt.  This  is  a  grave  mistake,  for  farmer's  boys  re- 
member a  thousand  things  better  then  than  they  ever  do  after- 
ward. I  don't  think  that  my  own  memory  is  remarkable,  but  to- 
day, at  over  three  score  and  ten,  I  can,  with  the  utmost  distinct- 
ness, recall  the  names,  color,  markings,  size,  peculiarities  and,  in 
some  cases,  the  history  of  most  of  the  horses  that  were  on  the 
farm  when  I  was  eight  years  old.  I  can,  therefore,  have  no  hesita- 
tion in  accepting  Justin  Morgan's  evidence  on  account  of  his 
youthfulness,  at  the  time  of  which  he  speaks. 

Did  Justin  Morgan  know  what  he  was  saying  when  he  "always, 
while  he  lived,  called  his  horse  a  Dutch  horse?"  And  did  he 


374  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

understand  the  historical  meaning  of  his  words  when  "he  always 
spoke  of  him  as  of  the  best  blood?"  To  answer  these  questions 
we  must  make  some  reference  to  history.  The  Dutch  horses 
were  a  breed  wholly  distinct  from  the  horses  of  the  other  colonies. 
The  colony  of  New  Netherlands  (New  York)  received  its  supply 
from  Utrecht,,  in  Holland,  commencing  in  1624  and  a  few  years 
following.  In  forty  years  they  had  so  increased  that  the  colony 
was  well  supplied.  These  horses  were  about  fourteen  hands  and 
one  inch  high,  which  was  about  one  hand  higher  than  the  horses 
supplied  to  the  English  colonies.  They  were  not  only  higher, 
but  they  had  more  bone  and  muscle,  and,  I  think,  more  shapely 
necks.  In  every  respect  they  were  better,  except  that  they  were 
not  so  good  for  the  saddle,  for  the  reason,  as  I  think,  that  they  were 
not  pacers.  The  standard  that  determined  their  superiority  WHS 
the  higher  prices  at  which  they  were  bought  and  sold,  over  the 
New  England  horses,  as  shown  by  the  official  reports  of  the 
colony.  When  the  colony  passed  under  British  rule,  the  first 
governor  immediately  established  a  race  course  on  Hempstead 
Plains,  Long  Island,  and  there  in  1665  the  first  organized  race  in 
ibis  country  took  place.  This  was  long  before  the  English  race 
horse  had  reached  the  character  of  a  breed,  and  a  round  hundred 
years  before  the  first  representative  of  that  breed  reached  New 
York.  The  horses  that  ran  at  Hempstead  Plains  were  un- 
doubtedly Dutch  horses,  for  the  inhabitants  of  New  York  and 
Long  Island  attended  these  annual  meetings  in  great  numbers, 
and  as  they  were  nearly  all  Dutch  they  would  not  have  gone  a 
stone's  throw  to  see  an  English  horse  run.  These  annual  race 
meetings  were  kept  up  a  great  many  years  by  the  successive 
governors. 

In  1635  two  shiploads  of  Dutch  horses,  from  the  same  quarter, 
chiefly  mares,  reached  Salem,  Massachusetts,  and  were  sold  at 
prices  enormously  high  as  compared  with  the  prices  of  those  sent 
from  England  to  the  same  colony.  These  two  shiploads  added 
materially  to  the  average  size  of  the  horses  of  the  colony  of  Mas- 
sachusetts Bay,  as  shown  by  statistics,  as  well  as  the  other  colo- 
nies getting  their  foundation  stock  from  that  source.  We  may 
safely  conclude,  I  think,  that  some  of  the  descendants  of  these 
shiploads  were  taken  to  the  valley  of  the  Connecticut  when 
Hartford  was  planted,  for  we  not  infrequently  meet  with  the 
term  "Dutch  horse"  in  the  old  prints  of  that  valley.  Besides 
this  source  the  valley  of  the  Hudson  was  full  cf  them.  They 


THE    BLACK    HAWK    OR   MORGAN    FAMILY.  375 

retained  their  distinctive  appellation  till  about  the  beginning  of 
this  century. 

Mr.  0.  W.  Cook,  of  Springfield,  Massachusetts,  did  a  great 
-deal  of  fundamental  investigation  on  the  origin  of  this  family, 
away  back  in  1878-9,  etc.,  and  I  am  under  special  obligations  to 
him  for  being  the  first  man  to  open  my  eyes  to  the  great  confi- 
dence game  that  has  been  played  for  a  hundred  years,  and  all  orig- 
inating in  the  fabulous  story  of  "one  Smith."  Among  other  im- 
portant things  he  unearths  an  advertisement  of  Young  Bulrock 
that  was  advertised  to  stand  at  Springfield,  1792,  as  follows: 
"Young  Bulrock  is  a  horse  of  the  Dutch  breed,  of  a  large  size, 
.and  a  bright  bay  color,  etc."  In  speaking  of  his  pedigree,  Mr. 
Cook  most  pithily  remarks:  "In  view  of  the  three-fold  concur- 
rence of  time  and  place  and  breed,  it  fits  into  the  vacuum  in  the 
Morgan's  lineage  as  a  fragment  of  pottery  fits  into  its  comple- 
ment." There  was  another  horse  advertised  in 'Springfield  that 
year,  but  he  had  neither  name  nor  breed  and  in  color  he  was 
gray.  The  advertisement  of  Young  Bulrock  fits  in  time,  fits  in 
<jolor  and  fits  in  breed;  and  thus  removes  all  reasonable  doubt 
that  he  was  the  sire  of  the  original  Morgan  horse.  This  is  the 
reason  why  Justin  Morgan  "always,  while  he  lived,  called  him  a 
Dutch  horse;"  and  the  little  scrap  of  history  given  above  will 
show  why  he  always  spoke  of  him  as  "of  the  best  blood."  He 
was  right  in  the  former  and  he  was  right  in  the  latter  declara- 
tion. It  is  not  possible,  at  this  day,  to  prove,  technically,  these 
matters  of  a  hundred  years  ago,  but  after  considering  all  the 
facts  in  the  case,  we  must  conclude  that  they  are  satisfying  to 
the  human  understanding,  and  that  Justin  Morgan  told  the  truth. 

For  the  past  fifty  or  sixty  years  the  breeding  of  the  original 
Morgan  horse  has  been  a  subject  of  apparently  unending  con- 
troversy. The  real  facts  concerning  his  origin,  however,  have 
never  been  brought  to  light  and  fully  developed  until  within  the 
last  few  years,  and  it  is  probable  that  nothing  of  material  value 
will  ever  be  added  to  the  foregoing  tracing.  We  have  found 
from  contemporaneous  history  that  Lieutenant  Wright  Carpenter 
stole  a  horse  from  Colonel  James  De  Lancey  and  was  successful 
in  carrying  him  into  the  camp  of  the  patriots  at  Fishkill,  and 
that  is  all  we  know  about  that  particular  horse.  After  the  war 
was  over  it  is  stated  that  "one  Smith"  sold  a  horse  to  Mr.  Ward, 
of  Hartford,  and  represented  that  he  had  stolen  the  horse  from 
•Colonel  De  Lancey,  and  Mr.  Ward  sold  that  horse  to  Selah  Nor- 


376  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

ton,  who  seems  to  have  owned  him  as  long  as  he  lived.  It  must 
be  accepted  as  true  that  Lieutenant  Carpenter  captured  a  horse 
from  Colonel  De  Lancey,  but  we  cannot  accept  it  as  true  that 
this  was  the  same  horse  owned  by  Norton.  We  must  first  know 
how  and  where  "one  Smith"  got  him.  Norton  had  this  horse 
and  advertised  him  in  different  parts  of  the  country  for  public 
service  seven  or  eight  years  before  the  romance  of  his  history 
and  pedigree  was  given  to  the  world.  As  this  romance  would 
have  been  a  grand  feature  in  an  advertisement  of  a  stallion,,  Mr. 
Norton  was  too  slow  in  evolving  it,  and  when  he  did  bring  it  out 
nobody  believed  it.  At  that  period  many  portions  of  New  Eng- 
land abounded  in  stallions  with  bogus  pedigrees  and  histories, 
and  if  we  judge  Norton  by  his  acts  in  giving  his  horse  three 
different  names  at  different  times  and  places,  we  must  conclude 
he  was  ready  to  conceal  or  invent  anything  that  would  add  to 
his  horse's  popularity  and  patronage. 

SHERMAN  MORGAN. — In  his  history  of  the  Morgan  Horse,  Mr. 
Linsley  names  this  and  three  or  four  other  sons  of  the  original, 
that  were  kept  for  stock  purposes,  but  none  of  them  seems  to 
have  attained  any  eminence,  except  Sherman.  As  he  never  made 
any  pretensions  to  being  a  trotter,  he  would  have  been  forgotten 
long  ago,  had  it  not  been  for  the  lucky  circumstances  that  he- 
was  the  sire  of  Black  Hawk,  and  thus  his  name  has  been  pre- 
served. He  was  scant  fourteen  hands  high,  with  heavy  body  on 
short  legs,  and  carried  his  head  well  up.  He  was  a  chestnut  and 
foaled  about  1809.  There  has  always  been  a  doubt  in  the  minds 
of  many  as  to  whether  he  was  the  sire  of  Black  Hawk,  but  that 
question  will  be  considered  when  we  reach  that  horse.  His  dam 
was  a  very  handsome  mare,  brought  from  Naragansett,  a  pacer, 
and  a  very  desirable  saddle  mare.  In  the  trotting  "Begister,"  three 
representations  are  given  as  to  the  breeding  of  this  mare,  namely, 
that  she  was  of  the  Spanish  breed;  that  she  was  an  imported 
English  mare;  and  that  she  was  brought  from  Virginia  on  ac- 
count of  her  beauty  and  speed.  The  first  claim  seemed  to  have 
the  best  historical  support,  and  besides  this  she  was  brought  from 
Providence,  Bhode  Island,  and  was  a  very  fine  pacer.  The 
theory  was  then  prevalent  that  the  Narragansett  pacers  were  of 
the  "Spanish  breed."  The  elimination  of  that  foolish  notion 
from  the  history  of  the  pacers  does  not  affect  the  plain  statement 
that  she  was  a  Narragansett  pacer.  It  is  not  known  that  this 


THE    BLACK    HAWK    OR   MORGAN    FAMILY.  377 

mare  ever  produced  anything  else,  either  by  the  original  Morgan 
or  by  any  other  horse. 

BLACK  HAWK. — As  his  name  indicates,  this  horse  was  a  jet 
black,  and  was  something  over  fifteen  hands  high.  He  was 
foaled  1833,  was  got  by  Sherman  Morgan,  and  was  bred  by  Ben- 
jamin Kelly,  of  Durham,  New  Hampshire.  As  the  question  of  his 
paternity  has  been  the  subject  of  a  great  deal  of  bitter  con- 
troversy, continued  through  many  years,  and  participated  in  by 
men  of  intelligence,  on  both  sides,  I  must  give  the  history,  as  I 
understand  it.  Mr.  Kelly  kept  a  tavern  at  Durham  and  Mr. 
Bellows,  the  owner  of  Sherman  Morgan,  made  this  house  one  of 
his  points  of  stopping  as  he  traveled  his  horse,  in  his  circuit  of 
the  season.  Along  with  Sherman  he  had  another  horse  called 
Paddy,  black  as  a  raven,  that  did  some  service  at  seven  dollars, 
while  the  price  for  Sherman  was  fourteen  dollars.  On  one  of 
his  visits,  Mr.-  Kelly's  black  mare,  called  "Old  Narragansett" 
was  bred  to  Sherman  and  proved  to  be  in  foal.  Not  long  after 
this  Mr.  Kelly  sold  the  mare  to  Mr.  Shade  Twombly,  living 
about  two  miles  from  Durham,  and  a  part  of  the  agreement  was 
that  if  the  mare  should  prove  to  be  with  foal,  Mr.  Twombly  was 
to  pay  for  the  services  of  the  horse.  The  next  spring  the  mare 
dropped  a  fine  black  horse  colt,  and  Mr.  Twombly  claimed  the 
colt  was  by  Paddy  and  not  by  Sherman,  hence,  he.  refused  to  pay 
fourteen  dollars  for  the  services  of  Sherman,  but  was  willing  to 
pay  seven  dollars  for  the  services  of  Paddy.  This  resulted  in  a 
lawsuit  in  which  it  was  proved  that  Sherman  was  the  sire  of  the 
colt,  and  Mr.  Twombly's  estate  had  to  pay  the  money.  The  colt 
was  kept  by  Mr.  Twombly's  heirs,  at  pasture  in  Greenland,  New 
Hampshire,  till  he  was  about  two  years  old,  when  he  was  sold  at 
auction  to  Albert  Mathes,  of  Durham,  for  seventy  dollars  and 
from  him  he  passed  to  Benjamin  Thurston,  of  Lowell,  for  two 
hundred  dollars.  In  Thurston's  hands  he  became  quite  noted, 
locally,  as  a  trotter,  and  in  1844  he  became  the  property  of  David 
Hill,  of  Bridport,  Vermont,  where  he  became  altogether  the  most 
popular  stallion  in  the  United  States,  and  died -there  November, 
1856.  He  was  the  first  horse  to  command  one  hundred  dollars 
for  his  services;  and  many  of  the  great  mares  of  the  country 
were  sent  to  his  embrace,  among  them  the  world-renowned  Lady 
Suffolk,  but  unfortunately  she  failed  to  produce. 

To  understand  why  the  fight  against  the  Sherman  Morgan 
paternity  of  this  horse  should  have  been  so  bitter  and  so  per- 


378  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

sistent,  we  must  consider  the  condition  of  the  horse  interests  in 
New  England  at  that  time.  When  Black  Hawk  came  to  the 
front  the  Morgans  of  the  real  Morgan  type  had  already  attained 
some  degree  of  popularity  and  here  came  a  horse  overtopping 
them  all,  with  no  trace  of  the  Morgan  type  about  him.  He  and 
his  family  attracted  the  attention  of  purchasers  and  threw  a 
shadow  of  doubt  over  the  little  punchy,  hairy-legged  fellows  that 
knocked  out  many  a  sale.  Besides  this,  it  was  a  serious  and  real 
question  in  the  minds  of  a  great  many  honest  and  intelligent 
men,  as  to  whether  Sherman  Morgan,  so  typical  of  his  family, 
could  possibly  have  been  the  sire  of  a  horse  so  completely  outside 
of  the  family,  not  only  in  appearance  and  formation,  but  in  his 
ability  to  trot.  In  1847  Black  Hawk  was  pitted  against  the 
Morse  Horse,  mile  heats,  best  two  in  three,  at  the  Saratoga  State 
Fair.  He  won  the  first  heat  in  2:50|  and  the  second  in  2:43^. 
He  was  then  fourteen  years  old  and  this  was  very  fast,  for  a. 
stallion  of  that  period.  It  is  but  justice  to  say  that  the  Morse 
Horse  contingent  claimed  that  Black  Hawk  was  set  back  in  the 
first  heat  for  running  and  that  the  heat  was  given  to  the  Morse 
Horse  in  2:52|  and  that  the  second  and  third  heats  were  won  by 
Black  Hawk  in  2:54^  and  2:56.  Just  what  the  truth  is  in  this 
disagreement  I  am  not  able  to  determine.  As  we  look  at  this 
horse,  so  distinct  from  all  his  tribe;  and  as  we  consider  the  very 
indistinct  knowledge  of  the  laws  of  generation  as  held  by  the 
masses  in  that  day,  we  cannot  wonder  that  the  paternity  was  so 
vehemently  disputed.  Neither  can  we  wonder,  as  his  descend- 
ants pass  in  review  before  us,  that  this  dispute  has  never  been 
settled  to  the  satisfaction  of  the  contending  parties.  The  old 
Morgan  type  never  reappears  in  the  descendants  of  this  family. 

But,  we  must  not  forget  that  we  have  considered  only  half  of 
the  inheritance  of  this  horse.  He  had  a  dam  as  well  as  a  sire. 
To  that  half  of  his  pedigree  we  must  now  give  some  attention. 
The  story  of  the  "half-bred  English  mare,  brought  from  New 
Brunswick"  has  had  its  day  and  we  may  as  well  lay  it  aside  as  a 
humbug.  Mr.  Allen  W.  Thomson,  of  Woodstock,  Vermont,  has 
brought  out  the  facts  with  regard  to  this  mare  in  a  form  that  is 
very  clear  and  satisfactory.  In  1876  Mr.  Thomson  visited  Albany 
for  the  purpose  of  examining  everything  that  had  been  said  in 
The  Country  Gentleman  newspaper  touching  on  the  paternity  of 
Black  Hawk.  In  this  search  for  the  sire  he  would  necessarily 
find  many  references  to  the  dam  and  among  these  references  he 


THE    BLACK   HAWK   OR    MORGAN    FAMILY.  379 

was  greatly  surprised  to  find  she  had  been  described  as  "a  pacing 
mare."  He  goes  on  to  say:  "In  our  visit  the  same  fall  to  Dur- 
ham, Dover,  Portsmouth  and  Greenland  to  learn  more  of  her,  we 
found  a  number  that  knew  her  when  owned  in  Durham,  and  they 
said  she  was  then  known  as  the  'Old  Narragansett  Mare/  They 
said  that  Benjamin  Kelly,  deceased,  brought  the  mare  into  Dur- 
ham, that  he  had  a  son  John  L.  living  in  Manchester,  New 
Hampshire,  and  that  he  would  know  more  about  her,  etc." 
After  learning  that  Mr.  John  L.  Kelly  was  a  very  intelligent  and 
responsible  man,  having  been  city  marshal  and  mayor  of  Man- 
chester, and  known  as  "Honest  John,"  he  wrote  him  and  received 
the  following  reply: 

"  In  answer  to  your  inquiries  about  the  dam  of  Black  Hawk,  I  will  give  you 
my  best  recollections,  aided  somewhat  by  a  dairy  which  I  kept  at  that  time.  I 
returned  to  Durham  from  a  sea  voyage  in  the  fall  of  1830.  In  the  following 
spring  I  went  to  Boston  wif  i  my  father  with  a  lot  of  horses.  We  stopped 
overnight  at  Brown's  Hotel,  at  Haverbill,  Mass.,  where  we  met  a  teamster 
from  Portsmouth,  N.  H.,  with  a  team  of  four  horses.  In  the  hind  span  was  a 
large  gray  horse  and  a  dark  bay  mare.  Among  father's  horses  was  one  which 
was  &  good  match  for  the  gray  horse.  The  man  noticed  it  and  told  father  that 
the  mare  was  too  fast  for  the  horse,  was  worth  two  of  him  for  speed  and  bot- 
tom, yet  he  would  trade  with  father  for  his  gray  horse.  After  a  good  deal  of 
talk,  with  the  aid  of  Mr.  Brown,  the  trade  was  made  and.  we  drove  the  mare 
in  the  carriage  to  Boston,  leading  the  others.  We  found  her  to  be  a  splendid 
roadster,  and  as  she  was  not  in  good  condition  to  sell,  we  took  her  back  to  Dur- 
ham. At  this  time  she  was  chafed  and  bruised  up  very  badly  with  the  heavy 
hames,  yet  in  a  few  months  she  came  out  of  it,  with  no  traces  of  it,  except  a. 
few  white  spots  on  her  back  and  breast.  The  teamster  said  she  was  a  Narra- 
gansett  mare.  She  would  weigh  1.000  pounds.  Father  kept  her  as  one  of  his 
stable  horses.  She  was  found  to  have  great  speed  as  a  trotter,  and  father  was 
always  bragging  about  her.  One  day,  late  in  the  season,  Israel  Esty,  of  Dover, 
drove  up  to  Durham  with  a  trotter,  and  bantered  father  for  a  trot,  mile  heats 
on  Madbury  Plains,  between  Durham  and  Dover.  I  had  great  faith  in  the 
mare  and  pleaded  with  father  to  accept  his  offer,  and  he  did,  and  fifty  dollars 
was  staked  on  the  race.  John  Speed  was  father's  hostler,  at  the  time,  and  he 
commenced  getting  the  mare  ready  for  the  race.  He  had  only  three  weeks  to 
do  it  in.  At  the  time  specified,  a  large  collection  of  people  from  Dover  and 
Durham  collected  to  witness  the  race.  Dr.  Reuben  Steele  was  one  of  the 
judges.  The  Esty  horse  won  the  first  heat,  the  Kelly  mare  won  the  next  two, 
distancing  the  horse  in  the  last  one.  In  the  spring  of  1832  John  Bellows  came 
to  Durham  with  the  old  Sherman  Morgan,  and  I  persuaded  father  to  have  the 
mare  bred  to  him.  He  did,  as  I  saw  the  horse  cover  her.  I  was  21  in  1832; 
went  to  sea  again  that  fall.  My  recollection  of  the  dam  of  Black  Hawk  is  she 
was  a  very  fine  pointed  dark  mare,  with  a  nostril  so  large,  when  excited,  that 
one  could  put  his  fist  into  it.  JOHN  L.  KELLY. 

"Manchester.  N.  H.,  August  25,  1876." 


380  THE    HOUSE    OF    AMERICA. 

The  only  "trip"  in  this  letter  is  where  Mr.  Kelly  speaks  of  the 
mare  as  "a  dark  bay/'  but  as  the  identity  of  the  mare  is  fully 
maintained  by  other  witnesses,  this  shade  of  color  is  not  material 
and  is,  doubtless  a  slip  of  the  pen.  We  don't  know  she  was  a 
Narragansett  mare,  but  we  do  know  that  she  was  called  a  Narra- 
gansett.  It  is  wholly  possible  she  may  have  been  a  bastard  Nar- 
ragansett,  or  she  may  have  been  called  a  Narragansett  merely 
because  she  was  a  pacer.  At  that  date  there  were  still  many  de- 
scendants of  the  old  Narragansetts  to  be  found,  of  greater  or  less 
degree  of  purity  in  their  breeding.  Among  Mr.  Thomson's 
gleanings  from  persons  who  knew  the  mare  there  are  some  bear- 
ing upon  her  color  and  gait  that  are  in  order  at  this  point  of  our 
inquisition.  Mr.  John  Bellows,  the. owner  of  Sherman  Morgan, 
says:  "She  was  a  good-sized  black  mare,  a  fast  trotter,  with  a 
swinging  gait,  and  resembled  in  appearance  the  Messenger  stock 
of  horses."  The  following  description  was  gathered  from  several 
persons  who  knew  the  mare  well  and  among  them  Mr.  Wingate 
Twombly,  son  of  her  former  owner.  "She  was  a  large,  rangy 
mare,  a  little  coarse  and  brawny,  did  not  carry  much  flesh,  might 
have  weighed  some  over  one  thousand  pounds  and  was  a  trifle 
over  fifteen  and  one-half  hands  high.  Head  and  ears  rather 
large,  neck  long  and  straight,  withers  low  and  thin,  medium 
mane  and  tail,  had  more  hair  on  the  fetlocks  than  her  son,  was 
called  black  a  little  way  off,  but  close  to  one  could  see  her  grey 
hairs  mingled  with  her  coat  and  close  to  she  was  called  a  steel 
mixed.  She  had  a  white  strip  in  her  face  and  some  say  a  little 
white  on  one  hind  foot.  She  was  smart  to  go,  but  her  gait  was 
not  a  smooth,  square  trot.  Some  called  it  a  sort  of  a  pace, 
others  that  she  single-footed.  She  went  with  her  head  low  when 
trotting  fast.  One  person  said  it  was  about  a  straight  line  from 
her  back  to  her  head  when  she  was  going  fast.  She  was  called 
the  Narragansett  Mare  when  Mr.  Kelly  owned  her.  From  other 
sources  and  from  men  who  personally  knew  the  mare  and  had 
ridden  beside  her,  we  have  undoubted  evidence  that  she  was  very 
fast,  but  all  through  there  is  some  confusion  about  the  character 
of  her  gait.  Mr.  Bellows,  who  ought  to  know  something  about 
the  gait  of  a  horse,  says:  "She  was  a  fast  trotter,  with  a  swing- 
ing gait."  Now  just  what  he  means  by  the  phrase  "swinging 
gait"  is  hard  to  determine.  Putting  all  these  bits  of  evidence 
together,  the  reasonable  conclusion  seems  to  be  that  she  was 


THE    BLACK    HAWK    OR    MORGAN    FAMILY.  381 

double-gaited,  and  when  speeded  she  would  go  from  the  trot  to 
the  pace  or  from  the  pace  to  the  trot  as  the  case  might  be. 

From  this  synopsis  of  all  that  has  been  developed  in  the  blood 
lines  of  Black  Hawk,  there  can  be  no  longer  any  mystery  about 
where  he  got  the  characteristics  making  him  so  intensely  differ- 
ent from  the  representatives  of  the  typical  Morgan.  His  sire 
was  out  of  a  high-class  Narragansett  pacer,  and  his  dam  was  prob- 
bly  a  fast  Narragansett  pacer,  thus  giving  him  presumably 
seventy-five  per  cent,  of  Narragansett  blood  and  twenty-five  per 
cent,  of  Morgan  blood.  The  fight  that  was  made  against  him  all 
his  life,  as  not  being  a  genuine  Morgan,  had  its  foundation  in 
justice  and  truth.  He  was  not  a  Morgan  in  either  blood  or  char- 
acter. He  founded  a  very  valuable  line  of  trotters,  something 
that  no  other  branch  of  the  Morgan  family  has  ever  accomplished, 
and  of  right  his  descendants  should  be  designated  as  "the 
Black  Hawk  Family,"  and  not  jumbled  up  with  the  heterogeneous 
mass  of  nondescripts  still  called  "the  Morgan  Family."  Black 
Hawk's  gait  was  spluttery  and  uneven,  rather  than  square  and 
mechanical.  A  few  of  his  progeny  were  very  perfectly  gaited, 
but  a  great  many  of  them  manifested  their  evil  inheritance, 
which,  together  with  unskillful  handling,  destroyed  all  possible 
value  as  trotters.  He  placed  three  in  the  2:30  list;  fourteen  of 
his  sons  were  sires  of  2:30  performers,  six  of  them  with  two  or 
more,  and  two  daughters  produced  2:30  performers.  He  died 
November,  1856. 

ETHAN  ALLEN,  43. — This  was  a  handsome,  bright  bay  horse, 
less  than  fifteen  hands  high,  with  three  white  feet  and  a  star. 
He  was  foaled  1849,  got  by  Black  Hawk,  5;  dam,  a  fast  trotting 
grey  mare  of  unknown  pedigree.  "With  a  list  of  all  the  cele- 
brated American  horses  before  him,  it  would  be  very  difficult,  if 
not  impossible,  for  the  best-informed-horseman  to  select  an  animal 
that  has  been  so  great  a  favorite  with  the  American  people,  and 
for  so  long  a  time,  as  the  famous  Ethan  Allen.  When  four  years 
old  he  gave  the  world  a  sensation  by  eclipsing  everything  that 
had  appeared  before  him  at  that  age;  and  again  when  he  was 
eighteen  years  old  he  renewed  and  intensified  the  sensation  by 
trotting  in  2:15  with  a  running  mate.  These  sensations  of  his 
youth  and  his  old  age,  did  much  to  give  him  a  standing  with  the 
people;  but  his  wonderful  beauty  and  remarkable  docility  and 
kindness,  with  the  elegance  and  ease  of  his  action,  made  him  the 
favorite  of  everybody.  His  trotting  gait  was  recognized  by  the 


382  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

best  judges  and  experts  as  probably  more  perfect  than  that  of 
any  horse  of  his  day.  Others  have  gone  faster  singly,  but  no 
one  has  done  it  in  greater  perfection  of  motion.  In  his  great 
nights  of  speed  he  was  not  bounding  in  the  air,  but  down  close 
to  the  ground,  with  a  gliding  motion  that  steals  from  quarter 
pole  to  quarter-pole  with  inconceivable  rapidity.  He  was  bred 
by  Joel  W.  Holcomb,  of  Ticonderoga,  New  York,  and  as  the  re- 
sult of  a  practical  joke  he  played,  for  the  purpose  of  annoying  his 
uncle,  David  Hill,  the  owner  of  Black  Hawk,  against  whom  he 
had  some  pique  just  at  that  time,  many  well-meaning  and  no 
doubt  honest  people  once  believed,  and  possibly  still  believe,  that 
Ethan  Allen  was  by  Flying  Morgan  and  not  by  Black  Hawk. 
The  fact  that  Ethan  Allen  was  the  same  color  as  Flying  Morgan 
and  that  there  was  some  resemblance  in  size  and  style  of  action 
of  the  two  horses,  lent  a  strong  suggestion 'to  the  joke  as  a  truth. 
I  am  indebted  to  Mr.  I.  V.  Baker,  Jr.,  of  Comstock's  Landing, 
S.  B.  Woodward,  then  of  Ticonderoga,  and  B.  H.  Baldwin,  of 
Whitehall,  New  York,  for  the  details  of  the  way  the  Flying  Mor- 
gan story  started,  and  need  only  say  the  narrator  was  an  eye-wit- 
ness to  the  whole  affair.  In  the  spring  of  1852,  in  the  barroom 
of  S.  B.  Woodward's  hotel,  at  Ticonderoga,  quite  a  number  of 
the  villagers  being  present,  Mr.  Joel  W.  Holcomb  came  in  and 
said  he  was  going  to  write  a  letter  to  R.  M.  Adams,  of  Burling- 
ton, Vermont,  the  owner  of  Flying  Morgan,  and  he  was  going  to 
have  some  fun  with  him;  and,  going  to  the  desk  in  the  room,  he 
wrote,  substantially  as  follows:  "I  don't  know  but  I  have  made 
all  the  reputation  for  David  Hill  and  old  Black  Hawk  that  I 
care  to.  I  am  willing  to  have  the  credit  go  where  it  belongs, 
and  desire  to  let  yourself  and  the  public  know  that  my  colt  Ethan 
Allen  .is  got  by  your  horse  Flying  Morgan." 

"There,"  he  said,  "you  will  see  this  in  all  the  Vermont  papers 
next  week.  Won't  Uncle  David  be  mad?" 

"What!"  exclaimed  some  of  his  neighbors,  after  hearing  -it 
read,  "you  won't  put  your  name  to  such  a  falsehood  as  thatv 
It's  a  shame." 

"Well,  well,"  said  Holcomb,  "I'll  add  a  postscript."  And 
going  to  the  desk  he  wrote  below  his  signature,  leaving  a  good 
wide  space  between  his  signature  and  the  following  words: 

"Flying  Morgan  never  covered  the  dam  of  Ethan  Allen,  never 
smelt  of  her  and  never  saw  her,  consequently  Ethan  Allen  was 


THE    BLACK    HAWK    OR    MORGAN    FAMILY.  383 

not  by  Flying  Morgan,  but  he  can  beat  Flying  Morgan  or  any 
other  stallion  in  the  State  of  Vermont." 

The  next  fall  Mr.  Adams  visited  many  of  the  fairs  with  his 
horse  and  showed  Holcomb's  letter,  and,  it  is  said,  with  the  post- 
script torn  off.  Every  man  in  Ticonderoga  knew  as  well  as  Mr. 
Holcomb  how  Ethan  Allen  was  bred,  and  this  letter  created 
much  indignation.  But  Holcomb  was  a  reckless  man  and  cared 
for  nothing  more  than  what  he  called  a  good  joke,  and  the 
more  it  hurt  any  one's  feelings  the  better  it  suited  him. 

This  account  of  the  "joke"  was  written  down  by  Mr.  Baker, 
at  the  dictation  of  Mr.  Woodward,  April  22,  1875,  and  I  have 
implicit  confidence  in  its  substantial  accuracy.  It  has  been  said 
that  the  reason  Holcomb  did  this  was  out  of  ill  feeling  toward 
Mr.  David  Hill,  the  owner  of  Black  Hawk,  and  Holcomb's  uncle, 
because  he  dunned  him  for  payment  of  the  horse's  services  in 
getting  Ethan  Allen.  One  day  at  the  Fashion  Course,  in  the 
spring  of  1867,  as  I  was  looking  at  Ethan  while  he  was  taking 
his  daily  exercise,  either  Mr.  Holcomb  or  Mr.  Koe,  his  partner — 
I  knew  them  both  by  sight  as  the  owners  of  Ethan  Allen,  but  not 
well  enough  to  distinguish  one  from  the  other,  but  I  think  it  was 
Mr.  Holcomb — came  up  to  me  and  expressed  a  good  deal  of 
solicitude  to  know  how  I  was  registering  the  horse.  He  ap- 
peared gratified  when  I  assured  him  I  had  no  doubt  he  was  a  son 
of  old  Black  Hawk  and  would  so  enter  him.  He  remarked  "that 
was  right,"  and  said  the  Flying  Morgan  story  originated  in  a 
practical  joke  and  should  not  be  permitted  to  go  into  history  as  a 
fact.  This  is  the  full  history  of  the  basis  of  the  controversy, 
and  certainly,  to  a  reasonable  man,  it  does  not  leave  a  single  peg 
on  which  to  hang  a  hope  for  the  Flying  Morgan  story. 

But,  the  paternity  of  Ethan  Allen  is  not  left  to  the  uncertain- 
ties of  recollection  nor  to  be  trifled  with  by  practical  jokers. 
The  books  of  Black  Hawk's  services  show  that  the  dam  of  Ethan 
Allen  was  bred  to  him  on  a  certain  day  or  days  of  the  season  of 
1848,  and  was  taken  away  believed  to  be  in  foal.  This  fact  is  con- 
ceded on  all  hands  as  wholly  indisputable,  but  it  is  claimed  that 
Flying  Morgan  was  kept  in  Holcomb's  stable  one  night,  after  the 
mare  returned  from  Bridport,  and  the  two  were  there  surrepti- 
tiously coupled.  I  have  studied  this  claim  in  all  its  details,  I 
have  examined  every  detail  minutely,  and  I  do  not  hesitate  to 
say  there  is  not  a  single  shadow  of  evidence  to  support  the  claim. 
In  Vermont,  as  in  Kentucky,  there  are  many  people  who  can  re- 


384  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

member  things  that  never  occurred,  but  in  the  former  State  these 
people  are  at  a  great  disadvantage,  for  they  are  not  able  to  get  so 
many  to  agree  with  and  support  their  remarkable  memories. 
The  Vermonters  are  very  far  from  being  all  honest,  but  they  are 
very  much  disposed  to  make  up  their  own  minds,  whether  right 
or  wrong. 

In  searching  for  the  breeding  of  the  little  flea-bitten  grey 
mare,  "called  a  Messenger,"  that  produced  Ethan  Allen,  I  have 
not  been  sparing  of  either  time  or  labor.  I  have  assiduously 
followed  every  clew  that  presented  itself,  and  waded  through 
"sloppy"  correspondence  "knee  deep/'  but  I  never  have  been 
able  to  reach  a  single  point  that  was  relevant  and  tangible. 
From  the  first  that  is  known  of  her  at  Hague,  New  York,  her 
identity  has  been  maintained  by  a  spavin  on  one  leg  and  one  hip 
knocked  down,  and  thus  she  has  been  traced  through  the  hands 
of  many  owners  till  she  reaches  Mr.  Holcomb,  of  Ticonderoga, 
New  York.  A  pretence  has  been  set  up  that  she  was  by  some 
Morgan  horse,  but  this  was  only  a  wish  of  the  originator,  and  not 
a  fact  founded  on  reasonable  evidence.  It  is  said  she  was  quite 
a  fast  trotter,  in  her  younger  days,  and  that  she  could  beat  all 
the  farmers'  horses  against  which  she  was  started.  That  she 
had  a  trotting  inheritance,  and  probably  from  Messenger,  there 
can  be  no  reasonable  duubt. 

Ethan  Allen  made  his  first  appearance  as  a  trotter  at  the  Clin- 
ton County  Fair,  as  a  three-year-old,  and  made  a  record,  over  a 
very  bad  track,  of  3:20 — 3:21.  In  May  following,  then  four  years 
old,  at  the  Union  Course,  he  beat  Eose  of  Washington  in  2:36 — 
2:39 — 2:42.  This  was  then  the  fastest  time  ever  made  by  a  four- 
year-old.  He  then  retired  to  the  stud  and  did  not  again  appear 
till  October,  1855,  when,  over  the  Cambridge  Park  Course,  he 
beat  Columbus,  Sherman  Black  Hawk,  and  Stockbridge  Chief  for 
the  stallion  purse  in  2:34£ — 2:37.  Three  of  the  contestants  here- 
were  sons  of  Black  Hawk.  The  next  season  he  defeated  Hiram 
Drew  twice,  to  wagon,  making  a  record  of  2:32f.  October  15, 
1858,  at  Boston,  he  beat  Columbus  Jr.,  and  Hiram  Drew,  2:37 — 
2:35 — 2:33.  The  same  month,  on  the  Union  Course,  he  beat 
George  M.  Patchen,  to  wagons,  distancing  him  the  first  heat  in. 
2:28.  At  the  Union  Course,  Long  Island,  July  12,  1860,  he  beat 
Princess,  distancing  her  the  second  heat  in  2:29^- — 2:25$.  This, 
is  his  fastest  record.  He  was  frequently  beaten  by  George  M. 
Patchen,  Flora  Temple,  etc.,  and  it  was  thought  by  many  that 


THE   BLACK   HAWK   OR   MORGAN    FAMILY.  385 

he  could  not  take  up  the  weight  and  "hold  the  clip"  for  the  full 
inile  out.  His  most  famous  performance  was  made  in  1867,  and 
as  I  had  the  pleasure  of  witnessing  it,  from  a  very  eligible  posi- 
tion, I  will  here  repeat  the  description  as  then  made: 

"On  the  21st  of  June,  1867,  on  the  Fashion  Course,  it  was 
my  good  fortune  to  witness  the  crowning  event  of  his  life. 
Some  three  weeks  before,  with  running  mate,  he  had  beaten 
Brown  George  and  running  mate,  in  very  fast  time,  scoring  one 
heat  in  2:19.  This  made  horsemen  open  their  eyes,  and  there  at 
once  arose  a  difference  of  opinion,  about  the  advantage  to  the 
trotter  of  having  a  runner  hitched  with  him,  to  pull  the  weight. 
This  resulted  in  a  match  for  two  thousand  five  hundred  dollars 
to  trot  Ethan  Allen  and  running  mate  against  Dexter,  who  was 
then  considered  invincible.  As  the  day  approached  the  betting 
was  about  even;  but  the  evening  before  the  race,  word  came 
from  the  course  that  Ethan's  running  mate  h&5.  fallen  lame  and 
could  not  go,  but  they  would  try  to  get  Brown  George's  running 
mate,  then  in  Connecticut,  to  take  the  place  of  the  lame  runner. 
As  the  horses  were  strangers  to  each  other,  it  was  justly  con- 
cluded that  the  change  gave  Dexter  a  great  advantage  and  the 
betting  at  once  changed  from  even  to  two  to  one  on  Dexter. 
Long  before  noon  the  crowd  began  to  assemble;  the  sporting  men 
everywhere  were  shaking  rolls  of  greenbacks  over  their  heads, 
shouting  "two  to  one  on  Dexter."  I  met  a  friend  from  Chicago, 
who  sometimes  speculated  a  little,  and  when  he  told  me  he  was 
betting  two  to  one  on  Dexter,  I  took  the  liberty  of  advising  him 
to  be  cautious,  for  I  thought  the  team  would  win  the  race,  and 
that  its  backers  knew  what  they  were  doing.  Before  the  hour 
arrived  I  secured  a  seat  on  the  ladies'  stand,  from  which  every 
foot  of  the  course,  and  the  countless  multitudes  of  people,  could 
be  taken  in  at  a  glance.  The  vehicles  in  numbers  were  simply 
incalculable,  and  the  multitudes  were  estimated  at  forty  thousand 
people.  Upon  the  arrival  of  the  hour,  the  judges  ascended  the 
stand  and  rang  up  the  horses,  when  the  backers  of  the  team 
came  forward,  explained  the  mishap  that  had  befallen  the  run- 
ner, that  they  had  Brown  George's  mate  on  the  ground,  but,  as 
he  and  Ethan  had  never  been  hitched  together,  they  were  un- 
willing to  risk  so  large  a  sum,  and  closed  the  race  by  paying  one 
thousand  two  hundred  and  fifty  forfeit.  When  this  announce- 
ment was  made  there  was  a  general  murmur  that  spread,  step  by 
step,  through  all  that  vast  multitude.  The  betting  fraternity 


386  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

were  just  where  they  started  and  every  spectator  realized  a  feel- 
ing of  disgust  at  the  whole  management.  As  soon  as  this  had 
time  to  exert  its  intended  effect  upon  the  crowd,,  the  backers  of 
the  team  came  forward  again  and  expressed  their  unwillingness 
to  have  the  people  go  away  dissatisfied,  and  proposed  a  little 
match  of  two  hundred  and  fifty  a  side,  which  was  promptly 
accepted  by  the  Dexter  party;  and  when  it  was  known  there 
would  be  a  race  after  all  the  shout  of  the  multitudes  was  like  the 
voice  of  many  waters. 

"This  being  a  new  race,  the  betting  men  had  to  commence  de 
novo.  The  surroundings  of  the  pool  stands  were  packed  with  an 
eager  and  excited  crowd,  anxious  to  get  on  their  money  at  two, 
and  rather  than  miss,  at  three  to  one  on  Dexter.  The  work  of 
the  auctioneers  was  short,  sharp  and  decisive,  and  the  tickets 
were  away  up  in  the  hundreds  and  oftentimes  thousands.  But 
the  pool-stands  did  not  seem  to  accommodate  more  than  a  small 
fraction  of  those  anxious  to  invest,  and  in  all  directions  in  the 
surging  crowd,  hands  were  in  the  air,  filled  with  rolls  of  green- 
backs, and  shouting  "two  to  one  on  Dexter."  I  was  curious  to 
note  what  became  of  these  noisy  offers,  and  I  soon  observed  that 
a  quiet-looking  man  came  along,  took  all  the  party  had  to  invest 
and  then  went  quietly  to  another  of  the  shouters,  and  then  another 
and  so  on,  till  I  think  that  every  one  who  had  money  to  invest, 
at  that  rate,  was  accommodated.  The  amount  of  money  bet  was 
enormous,  no  doubt  aggregating  a  quarter  of  a  million,  in  a  few 
minutes. 

"When  the  horses  appeared  on  the  track  to  warm  up  for  the 
race,  Dexter,  driven  by  the  accomplished  reinsman  Budd  Doble, 
was  greeted  with  a  shout  of  applause.  Soon  the  team  appeared, 
and  behind  it  sat  the  great  master  of  trotting  tactics,  Dan  Mace. 
His  face,  which  has  so  often  been  a  puzzle  to  thousands,  had  no 
mask  over  it  on  this  occasion.  It  spoke  only  that  intense  ear- 
nestness that  indicates  the  near  approach  of  a  supreme  moment. 
The  team  was  hitched  to  a  light  skeleton  wagon;  Ethan  wore 
breeching,  and  beside  him  was  a  great  strong  race  horse,  fit  to 
run  for  a  man's  life.  His  traces  were  long  enough  to  allow  him 
to  fully  extend  himself,  but  they  were  so  much  shorter  than 
Ethan's  that  he  had  to  take  the  weight.  Dexter  drew  the  inside, 
and  on  the  first  trial  they  got  the  send  off  without  either  one  having 
six  inches  the  advantage.  When  they  got  the  word,  the  flight  of 
speed  was  absolutely  terrific,  so  far  beyond  anything  I  had  ever 


THE  BLACK  HAWK  OR  MOKGAN"  FAMILY.          387 

witnessed  in  a  trotting  horse,  that  I  felt  the  hair  rising  on  my 
head.  The  running  horse  was  next  to  me,  and  notwithstanding 
my  elevation,  Ethan  was  stretched  out  so  near  the  ground  that 
I  could  see  nothing  of  him  but  his  ears.  I  fully  helieved  that, 
for  several  rods  at  this  point,  they  were  going  at  a  two-minute 
gait. 

4 'It  was  impossible  that  this  terrible  pace  could  be  maintained 
long,  and  just  before  reaching  the  first  turn  Dexter's  head  began 
to  swim  and  the  team  passed  him  and  took  the  track,  reaching 
the  first  quarter-pole  in  thirty-two  seconds,  with  Dexter  three  or 
four  lengths  behind.  The  same  lightning  speed  was  kept  up 
through  the  second  quarter,  reaching  the  half-mile  pole  in  1:04, 
with  Dexter  still  farther  in  the  rear.  Mace  then  took  a  pull  on 
his  team,  and  came  home  a  winner  by  six  or  eight  lengths,  in 
2:15.  When  this  time  was  put  on  the  blackboard,  the  response 
of  the  multitude  was  like  the  roar  of  the  ocean.  Although 
some  distance  away,  through  the  second  quarter  of  this  heat  I 
had  a  fair,  unobstructed  side  view  of  the  stallion  and  of  his  action, 
when  going  at  the  lightning  rate  of  2:08  to  the  mile.  I  could 
not  observe  that  he  received  the  slightest  degree  of  propulsion 
from  the  running  horse;  and  my  conviction  was  then,  and  is  now, 
that  any  such  propulsion  would  have  interfered  with  his  own  un- 
approachable action,  and  would  have  retarded  rather  than  helped 
him.  The  most  noticeable  feature  in  his  style  of  movement  was 
the  remarkable  lowness  to  which  he  dropped  his  body  and  the 
straight,  gliding  line  it  maintained  at  that  elevation. 

"The  team  now  had  the  inside,  and  in  the  first  attempt  they 
were  started  for  the  second  heat,  but  they  did  not  appear  to  me 
to  be  going  so  fast  as  in  the  first  heat.  Before  they  had  gone 
many  rods  Ethan  lost  his  stride  and  Dexter  took  the  track  at  the 
very  spot  where  he  had  lost  it  in  the  first  heat.  The  team  soon 
£ot  to  work,  and  near  the  beginning  of  the  second  quarter  col- 
lared Dexter,  but  the  stallion  broke  soon  after  and  fell  back,  not 
yards,  nor  lengths,  but  rods  before  he  caught.  Incredible  as  it 
may  seem,  when  he  again  got  his  feet,  he  put  on  such  a  burst  of 
speed  as  to  overhaul  Dexter  in  the  third  quarter,  when  he  broke 
again  and  Mace  had  to  pull  him  nearly  to  a  standstill  before  he 
recovered.  Dexter  was  now  a  full  distance  ahead  and  the  heat 
appeared  to  be  his  beyond  all  peradventure.  I  was  watching  the 
team  in  its  troubles  very  closely  and  my  idea  of  the  distance  lost 
was  the  result  of  a  deliberate  and  careful  estimate  at  the  moment; 


3t?8  THE    HOBSE    OF    AMERICA. 

and  the  query  in  my  mind  then  was  whether  the  team  could  save 
its  distance.  At  last  the  old  horse  struck  his  gait,  and  it  was. 
like  a  dart  out  of  a  catapult,  or  a  ball  from  a  rifle.  The  team 
not  only  saved  its  distance,  but  beat  Dexter  home  five  or  six 
lengths  in  2:16. 

''In  the  third  heat  Mace  had  it  all  his  own  way  throughout, 
coming  home  the  winner  of  the  race  in  2:19.  The  backers  of 
Dexter,  up  to  the  very  last,  placed  great  reliance  on  his  well- 
known  staying  qualities;  but  the  last  heat  showed  that  the  terri- 
ble struggle  told  upon  him  more  distressingly  than  upon  the 
team.  It  is  said  by  those  who  timed  Dexter  privately  that  he 
trotted  the  three  heats  in  2:17,  2:18,  and  2:21.  As  an  opinion, 
I  will  say  that  if  ever  there  was  an  honest  race  trotted  this  was 
one,  but  there  was  such  an  exhibition  of  sharp  diplomacy,  of  the 
"diamond  cut  diamond'7  order,  as  is  seldom  witnessed,  even 
among  the  sharp  practices  of  the  turf.  It  is  not  probable  that 
Ethan's  running  mate  fell  amiss  at  all,  the  evening  before,  as 
represented;  and  if  she  did,  it  was  not  possible  to  send  to  Con- 
necticut for  another  horse  and  have  him  there  early  in  the  morn- 
ing as  was  pretended.  This  was  a  mere  ruse  put  out  to  get  the 
advantage  of  the  long  odds.  The  managers  of  the  team  knew 
just  how  the  horses  would  work  and  knew  they  had  speed  enough 
to  beat  any  horse  on  earth.  When  the  race  was  called  and  they 
came  forward  and  paid  forfeit,  it  was  merely  to  give  the  'two  to 
one  on  Dexter'  money  encouragement  to  come  out.  It  did 
come  out  most  vociferously  and  was  all  quietly  taken.  It  was 
said  John  Morrissey  was  the  manager  in  chief,  and  that  his  share 
of  the  winnings  amounted  to  about  forty  thousand  dollars." 

I  have  here  given  my  personal  impressions  of  this  race,  not  be- 
cause the  performance  was  of  any  special  value,  as  a  test  of 
speed,  but  because  the  time  was  then  phenomenal,  even  with  this 
kind  of  hitch,  and  as  an  illustration  of  what'  certain  horses  can 
do  when  relieved  of  all.  weight.  This  was  among  the  first  of  the 
contests  of  this  kind,  and  although  some  effort  was  made  to  in- 
troduce this  plan  by  which  a  poor  horse  could  beat  a  good  one,  it 
never  has  received  much  encouragement.  With  all  his  perfec- 
tion of  gait  and  wide  popularity,  extending  from  early  life  to  old 
age,  Ethan  Allen  was  not  a  success  as  a  progenitor  of  speed.  He 
placed  but  six  in  the  2:30  list,  and  the  best — Billy  Barr — with  a 
record  of  2:23|.  He  left  but  one  son  equal  to  himself  as  a  sire, 
and  several  daughters  that  became  the  producers  of  single  per- 


THE   BLACK   HAWK    OR    MORGAN    FAMILY.  389 

formers.     He  was  kept  several  seasons  in  Kansas  and  died  there 
September,  1876. 

DANIEL  LAMBERT,  102,  was  a  chestnut  horse,  foaled  1858;  got 
by  Ethan  Allen,  43;  dam  Fanny  Cook,  by  Abdallah;  grandam  by 
Stockholm's  American  Star,  etc.  His  color  was  a  light  chestnut, 
and  his  mane  and  tail  were  of  the  yellow,  flaxen  shade.  He  was 
about  fifteen  hands  high  and  long  and  light  in  the  body,  with  no 
indications  of  Morgan  blood  about  him  unless  it  was  in  the 
kinkiness  of  his  mane  and  tail.  But  why  should  he  not  resemble' 
almost  anything  else  than  the  little  nondescript  Morgan,  when 
he  had  only  one-sixteenth  of  his  blood  in  his  veins?  He  had 
more  Messenger  than  Morgan  blood,  and  according  to  the  rules  of 
arithmetic  it  is  a  misnomer  to  call  him  a  Morgan.  More  than 
this,  his  dam  was  a  daughter  of  the  great  Abdallah,  far  and  away 
the  greatest  trotting  sire  of  his  generation.  When  we  consider 
that  he  had  four  times  as  much  of  the  blood  of  Abdallah  as  he 
had  of  the  original  Morgan,  we  can  see  the  absurdity  of  sticking 
to  the  right  male  line  after  that  line  has  been  wiped  out  by  other 
lines  far  more  potential.  Lambert  was  bred  by  Mr.  John  Porter 
of  Ticonderoga,  Xew  York,  and  as  a  colt  he  showed  great  promise 
on  the  ice,  and  was  thought  to  be  the  fastest  and  best  of  the  get 
-of  Ethan  Allen.  He  was  known  far  and  wide  as  the  "Porter 
Colt,"  and  he  was  the  popular  heir  to  very  great  expectations. 
To  have  created  so  much  enthusiasm  he  must  have  shown  great 
.speed  for  a  youngster,  and  he  is  credited  with  a  record  of  2:42  as 
a  three-year-old.  As  a  sire  of  trotters  he  stood  very  high  at  one 
time  and  was  even  with  Blue  Bull  in  his  number  of  representa- 
tives in  the  2:30  list,  but  in  the  end  the  little  "plebeian"  pacer 
outstripped  him  a  long  way.  Lambert  put  thirty-seven  trotters 
into  the  2:30  list,  but  when  we  come  to  study  this  list  we  are  not 
very  favorably  impressed,  for  about  one-third  of  the  animals  have 
but  a  single  heat  inside  of  the  mark,  with  only  five  or  six  reputa- 
ble campaigners  and  a  single  one — Comee — that  ranked  among  the 
real  good  ones.  Comee  had  seventy-one  heats  to  his  credit  and  a 
record  of  2:21-^.  Thirty-three  of  Daniel  Lambert's  sons  have  put 
one  hundred  and  thirty-six  in  the  list,  and  forty-four  of  his 
daughters  have  produced  seventy-four  performers. 


CHAPTER   XXVIII. 

THE  ORLOFF  TROTTER,  BELLFOUNDER,  AND  THE  ENGLISH  HACKNEY.. 

Orloffs  the  only  foreign  trotters  of  merit — Count  Alexis  Orloff,  founder  of  the 
breed — Origin  of  the  Orloff — Count  Orloff  began  breeding  in  1770— Sme- 
tanka,  Polkan,  and  Polkan'sson,  Barss,  really  the  first  Orloff  trotting  sire — 
The  Russian  pacers — Their  great  speed — Imported  Bellfounder — His  history 
and  characteristics — Got  little  speed — His  descendants — The  English 
Hackney — Not  a  breed,  but  a  mere  type — The  old  Norfolk  trotters — Hack- 
ney experiments  in  America  —  Superiority  of  the  trotting-bred  horse 
demonstrated  in  show-ring  contests. 

IT  may  be  a  little  outside  of  the  field  of  our  discussion  to  in- 
clude the  Orloff  Trotter,  but  as  a  few  of  them  have  been  brought 
to  this  country,  and  as  that  is  the  only  organized  and  recognized 
breed  of  trotters  in  all  the  world  beside  our  own,  it  seems  to  be 
necessary  to  give  a  brief  synopsis  of  the  origin  and  history  of 
that  breed,  so  far  as  we  may  be  able.  An  additional  and  proba- 
bly a  more  cogent  reason  for  making  this  foreign  detour  is  the 
fact  that  there  are  now  many  American  trotters  on  the  turf  in 
Europe,  and  practically  their  only  competitors,  whether  on  the; 
turf  or  in  the  breeding  studs,  are  the  Orloffs  of  Russia. 

"Wallace's  American  Trotting  Register,"  the  first  volume  of 
which  was  issued  in  1871,  was  an  individual  enterprise.  Two 
years  afterward  the  director-in-chief  of  the  Russian  Imperial 
Studs  submitted  a  series  of  questions  to  different  scientific  gentle- 
men, whose  studies  were  in  the  right  direction,  soliciting  their  views 
on  the  practicability  and  advisability  of  establishing  a  govern- 
mental standard  by  which  the  Orloff  trotters  should  be  classed  and 
officially  registered.  The  report  was  favorable  and  the  Russian 
trotting  register  was  established  under  governmental  direction. 
This  was  the  second  movement  toward  establishing  a  breed;  not 
merely  by  writing  a  lot  of  names  in  a  book,  but  by  writing  those 
names  on  the  turf  of  two  continents.  A  delegation  from  France 
once  visited  me  to  consult  about  establishing  a  Register  in  that 
country,  and  to  learn  how  to  commence  such  an  enterprise. 
When  I  asked  them  what  strains  of  blood  they  had  that  could 


THE   OKLOFF   TROTTER.  391 

trot,  they  did  not  seem  to  know  of  any  particular  'strains,  or  any 
one  strain  better  than  another,  to  serve  as  a  foundation,  but  they 
were  sure  they  had  plenty  of  trotters.  This  was  the  first  I  ever 
had  heard  of  French-bred  trotters,  and  it  was  the  last  I  ever 
heard  of  the  French  trotting  register. 

The  stalwart  Alexis  Orloff  took  a  very  active  part  in  making 
Catherine  II.  Empress  of  Russia — for  which  he  was  loaded  with 
honors  as  well  as  lucrative  offices.  In  the  war  with  the  Turks  in 
1772  he  was  given  command  of  the  Russian  fleet,  and  with  the 
assistance  of  the  English  fleet  under  Admiral  Elphinstone,  he 
achieved  a  great  victory  and  captured  the  pasha  in  command  of 
the  Turkish  fleet.  Owing  to  some  unusual  kindness  Count  Orloff 
was  able  to  extend  to  the  captured  Turkish  commander,  or  his 
family,  he  presented  the  count  with  a  pure  white  stallion,  said 
to  be  a  Barb,  which  he  took  home  with  him  and  placed  in  his 
stud  of  horses,  that  he  had  established  but  a  short  time  before. 
Another  story  is  that  the  count  bought  this  white  horse,  which 
he  called  Smetanka,  while  he  was  in  Greece  and  paid  a  large 
price  for  him.  I  am  not  able  to  say  which  representation  is  the 
more  probable,  and  it  is  not  material  to  our  history,  as  there  is 
no  dispute  about  the  identity  of  Smetanka  as  the  nominal  head 
of  the  Orion*  breed  of  horses,  and  neither  story  gives  any  infor- 
mation about  his  blood.  No  doubt  he  was  a  Turk.  Count  Alexis 
commenced  his  breeding  stud  in  1770,  and  there  appears  to  have 
been  a  good  deal  of  system  about  it  or  else  a  large  amount  of 
very  free  guessing.  When  first  established,  the  horse  breeders 
say,  it  consisted  of  stallions  and  mares  as  follows:  Arabs,  12  stal- 
lions, 10  mares;  Turkish,  1  stallion,  2  mares;  English,  20  stal- 
lions, 32  mares;  Dutch,  1  stallion,  8  mares;  Persian,  3  stallions, 
2  mares;  Danish,  1  stallion,  3  mares;  Mecklenburg,  1  stallion, 
5  mares.  From  this  it  will  be  seen  that  he  had  more  English  run- 
ning blood  than  all  the  other  varieties  put  together,  and  yet  no 
trotters  came  from  that  source.  From  this  great  variety  of  com- 
posite material  the  count  had  free  rein  in  his  grand  experiment 
cf  producing  the  type  of  horse  that  best  pleased  his  fancy.  As  a 
matter  of  course  the  indiscriminate  commingling  of  these  differ- 
ent strains  and  types  would  produce  a  mongrel  lot,  from  which  a 
few  superior  animals  might  be  selected,  and  doubtless  were 
selected,  for  breeding  purposes. 

The  different  writers  who  have  discussed  the  result  of  this 
experiment  seem  to  agree,  substantially,  that  two  distinct  types 


392  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

were  the  result — the  galloper  for  the  saddle  and  the  trotter  for 
harness— but  they  assume  what  appears  to  me  to  be  a  very  un- 
reasonable conclusion  that  both  these  types  were  indebted  to  the 
super-excellence  of  Smetanka.  The  count  was  one  of  the  most 
prominent  sporting  men  of  his  day,  an  inveterate  horse-racer  and 
cock-fighter.,  and  under  this  kind  of  management  it  is  hardly 
credible  that  the  twenty  English  thoroughbred  stallions  should 
have  been  put  aside  for  the  little  white  horse  of  positively  un- 
known origin.  But  whatever  may  have  been  the  predominating 
blood  in  the  saddle  department,  it  is  certain  that  the  trotter  is 
lineally  descended  from  Smetanka.  He  was  bred  on  a  Danish 
mare  and  produced  Polkan  (Volcan),  without  anything  new  or 
striking  in  his  characteristics.  Polkan  was  bred  on  a  Dutch  mare 
and  produced  Barss,  and  this  was  the  first  to  manifest  a  disposi- 
tion to  extend  himself  to  his  utmost  at  the  trot  and  to  stick  to  it. 
Barss  became  a  great  favorite  with  his  master;  for,  although  stum- 
bled upon,  he  was  a  new  creation  and  is  the  real  progenitor  of  all 
the  horses  that  bear  the  name  Orloff.  His  component  elements 
are  easily  expressed.  He  had  twenty-five  per  cent,  of  the  blood 
of  Smetanka;  twenty-five  per  cent,  of  the  blood  of  the  Danish 
mare,  and  fifty  per  cent,  of  the  blood  of  the  Dutch  mare,  it 
seems  to  be  reasonable  to  conclude,  therefore,  that  the  trotting 
instinct  must  be  found  in  the  unknown  elements  of  the  Dutch 
inare. 

Some  years  ago  Prof. (the  name  I  cannot  now  recall), 

from  the  Imperial  Agricultural  College,  near  Moscow,  Russia, 
paid  me  several  visits  for  the  purpose  of  gathering  up  what  infor- 
mation he  could  obtain  about  the  origin  and  history  of  the  Amer- 
ican Trotter.  He  was  very  intelligent  and  thorough  in  his 
methods  of  obtaining  information,  and  each  succeeding  day  he 
came  back  to  me  with  a  new  series  of  questions  hinging  upon 
previous  interviews,  and  all  carefully  prepared.  These  questions 
were  so  admirably  shaped  to  reach  the  vital  points  of  the  subject 
that  I  became  greatly  interested  in  the  man.  When  it  came  my 
turn  to  ask  questions,  my  first  one  was,  What  was  the  origin  and 
lineage  of  the  Dutch  mare  that  produced  Barss?  He  replied,  "Ah, 
the  scientific  men  of  Russia  would  give  a  great  deal  to  be  able  to 
answer  that  question."  We  both  agreed,  perfectly,  that  the  liv- 
ing instinct  of  the  trotter  came  from  that  mare,  but  he  was  not 
able  to  tell  me  anything  of  her  history  or  habits  of  action.  He 
told  me  there  were  many  pacers  in  Russia  and  that  the  best  ones 


THE   ORLOFF   TROTTER.  393 

came  from  the  province  of  Viatka  and  from  the  region  of  the 
Volga  River. 

As  the  true  source  from  which  the  Russian  trotters  have 
drawn  their  ability  to  trot  fast  has  not  been  developed  nor  deter- 
mined by  history,  we  must  consider  the  problem  in  the  light  o* 
the  surrounding  conditions,  and  possibly  our  American  experi- 
ences may  lead  to  its  solution.  In  1873  Prof.  Von  Mittendorf, 
at  the  request  of  the  director-in-chief  of  the  imperial  stud,  pre- 
pared a  very  able  paper  on  the  scientific  questions  involved  in 
the  establishment  of  a  Government  Register  for  the  Orloff  trot- 
ters. In  this  paper  he  discusses  the  pace  and  the  trot  as  both 
original  and  natural  gaits  and  insists  that  there  are  no  outward 
indications  in  form  or  shape  by  which  the  animal,  when  at  rest, 
can  be  decided  to  be  a  pacer  or  a  trotter.  In  his  own  words  he 
says: 

"  In  answer  to  the  question  whether,  from  the  form  of  a  horse  at  rest,  it 
can  be  ascertained  what  gait  would  be  easiest  assumed  by  it,  viz.,  trotting  or 
pacing,  I  must  confess  that  I  have  never  seen,  read  or  heard  of  such  marks, 
and,  indeed,  there  never  are  any  symptoms  or  signs  of  inclination  for  pacing 
in  the  proportions  of  any  horse  with  the  single  negative  exception,  viz.,  that 
great  speed  in  one-sided  motion  does  not  agree  with  a  large  frame,  which  is 
more  adapted  to  leaping,  and  hence  fast  pacers  are  never  found  among  large 
horses." 

This  is  the  view  as  taken  by  a  Russian  scientist  of  the  distinc- 
tion, or  rather  lack  of  distinction,  between  the  trotter  and  the 
pacer.  I  have  not  quoted  this  paragraph  from  Prof.  Mittendorf 
because  it  contained  anything  new  in  the  economy  of  breeding, 
but  to  prove  that  there  were  pacers  in  Russia  and  that  their  re- 
lation to  the  trotter  was  considered  in  the  formation  of  the  rules 
of  admission  to  the  Orloff  trotting  register.  A  very  intelligent 
writer,  evidently  a  Russian  and  one  who  knew  what  he  was  talk- 
ing about,  contributed  an  interesting  article  to  the  New  York 
Sun  of  July  9,  1877,  from  which  we  get  a  clear  and  strong  light 
on  the  practical  side  of  the  Russian  pacer,  and  I  will  here  again 
quote: 

"  Up  to  the  middle  of  the  last  century  horses  in  Russia  were  not  scientifi- 
cally bred  ;  they  ran  wild  in  many  parts  of  the  country.  Those  caught  on 
the  steppes  of  the  river  Don,  and  in  the  wilderness  of  the  district  of  Viatka, 
obtained  early  celebrity,  which  they  still  maintain.  The  Don  horses  are  those 
famous  Cossack  steeds  about  which  so  much  has  been  written  of  late.  The 
Viatka  horses,  or  Bitugues,  as  they  are  called,  are  the  genuine  trotters  of 
Russia,  They  are  all  pacers,  equally  remarkable  for  their  speed  and  their  en- 


394  THE    HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

durance.  But  since  the  Orloff  breed  has  been  introduced,  the  Bitugues  have 
been  excluded  from  all  matches,  on  the  ground  that  their  pacing  is  not 
orthodox. 

"  It  is  with  these  Bitugues  that  the  peculiar  troika  team,  of  which  a  speci- 
men was  shown  in  Fleetwood  Park,  on  Saturday,  originated.  A  fast,  sturdy 
Bitugue  is  put  in  shafts,  and  a  light  running  horse  from  the  steppes  harnessed 
on  each  side  of  him.  A  good  Bitugue  trots  so  fast  that  the  wild  steppe  run- 
ners have  to  be  whipped  all  the  time  to  force  them  to  keep  up  with  him.  The 
idea  of  putting  an  Orloff  trotter  in  the  place  of  a  Bitugue  is  very  queer,  as  no 
square  trotter  can  equal  the  speed  of  those  famous  pacers  of  Viatka,  and  keep 
abreast  with  side;  runners." 

From  these  three  several  sources  we  learn  a  number  of  facts 
that  may  have  a  more  or  less  important  bearing  upon  the  true 
origin  of  the  Orloff  trotter.  (1)  That  there  are  now,  and  have 
been  for  generations  past,  plenty  of  pacers  in  Russia.  (2)  That 
these  pacers  have  a  common  habitat,  north  and  east  of  the  Don. 

(3)  That  they  are  a  very  old  race,  running  back  in  the  centuries 
away  beyond  the  knowledge  of  man  or  the  records  of  history. 

(4)  That  they  are  a  very  fast  and  very  enduring  race,  and  that 
they  have  been  trained  for  generations  as  the  shaft  horses  of  the 
troika  and  their  speed  so  well  developed  as  to  require-  good  run- 
ning horses  to  keep  abreast  with  them.     (5)  That  they  are  of 
smaller  size  than  the  average  and  lack  symmetry,  and  thus,  not- 
withstanding their  great  speed  and  bottom,  they  and  their  blood 
are  excluded  from  registration  with  the  Orloffs.     (6)  That  they 
are  also  excluded  from  competing  for  any  prizes  that  may  be 
offered,  and  no  other  reason  is  suggested  than  that  they  would  be 
sure  to  win. 

Russia  and  America  both  have  pacers  and  they  are  both  carry- 
ing forward  the  breeding  and  development  of  the  trotter  with 
great  intelligence  and  success.  No  other  nation  has  been  able 
to  make  even  a  beginning  in  this  field  of  animal  economy  except 
by  the  introduction  of  the  foundation  stock  from  one  or  other  of 
these  two  countries.  It  may  be  taken  as  historically  true,  and 
as  applying  to  every  nation  on  the  face  of  the  earth,  that  where 
there  are  no  pacers  there  are  no  trotters.  Hundreds  of  unmis- 
takable experiences  in  this  country  go  to  show  that  the  pacer  is 
a  great  source  of  trotting  speed.  At  one  time  a  pacing  stallion 
of  obscure  pacing  origin  stood  at  the  head  of  the  list  of  all  stal- 
lions as  the  sire  of  the  greatest  number  of  trotters  with  fast 
records.  A  great  multitude  of  our  fastest  trotters  at  maturity 
were  foaled  pacers  from  trotting  parents.  It  is  no  longer  a  mat- 


THE    ORLOFF   TROTTER.  395 

ter  of  wonder  or  surprise  that  with  two  animals  from  the  same 
parents  one  of  them  should  be  a  fast  trotter  and  the  ether 
a  fast  pacer.  Neither  is  it  any  longer  remarkable  that  a  fast 
trotter  with  a  very  fast  record  should  turn  around  and  make  just 
as  fast  a  record  at  the  pace.  The  American  people  are  just  be- 
ginning to  realize,  in  its  full  force,  the  declaration  of  more  than 
twenty  years  ago;  that  the  trot  and  the  pace  are  simply  two  forms 
of  the  same  gait,  in  the  economy  of  motion.  The  only  differ- 
ence that  has  been  observed  as  between  two  brothers,  the  one  a 
pacer  and  the  other  a  trotter,  is  that  with  the  same  skill  in  han- 
dling the  pacer  will  come  to  his  speed  much  quicker  than  the 
trotter,  which  is  of  itself  a  strong  suggestion  at  least  that  the 
pace  is  the  more  natural  and  easier  form  of  the  one  gait. 

Xow,  in  view  of  the  fact  that  Smetanka  was  of  Saracenic  origin 
— a  strain  of  blood  that  has  always  been  antagonistic  to  the  pacer, 
and  never  produced  a  pacer  or  a  trotter;  and  in  view  of  the  fact 
that  his  grandson,  Barss,  is  accepted  as  the  first  of  all  Orloff 
trotters;  and  in  view  of  the  further  fact  that  in  thousands  of 
American  experiences  the  trotter  has  come  from  the  pacer,  it 
seems  to  be  a  reasonable  conclusion  that  the  "Dutch  Mare'7  that 
produced  Barss  had  a  strong  pacing  inheritance,  and  possibly 
had  her  speed  fully  developed,  as  the  Bitugue  in  the  count's  own 
team. 

Among  all  the  pleasures  which  Count  Orloff  derived  from  his 
experiments  in  breeding,  whether  of  gamecocks,  or  race  horses, 
or  saddlers,  or  trotters,  Barss  was  his  greatest  favorite  because  he 
was  his  highest  achievement  in  the  art  of  breeding.  This  judg- 
ment of  his  master  has  been  confirmed  in  the  experiences  and 
history  of  all  succeeding  generations  for  a  hundred  years,  and  the 
name  of  Barss  will  be  known  through  the  coming  centuries  as 
the  founder  of  a  mighty  breed  of  trotters.  I  once  possessed  a 
line  picture  of  Barss  hitched  to  a  sleigh  and  driven  by  his 
breeder,  Count  Orloff,  himself;  and  I  have  seen  it  stated  some- 
where that  this  picture  was  a  copy  of  a  bronze  statue  erected  to 
the  memory  of  the  Count  Orloff  and  the  greatest  horse  of  Russia. 
It  has  been  stated  by  some  writers,  but  with  what  measure  of 
authority  I  do  not  know,  that  for  about  thirty  years  after  the 
appearance  of  Barss  his  daughters  were  bred  to  English  thor- 
oughbreds, to  Arabs,  to  Anglo- Arabs,  and,  indeed,  to  all  the 
highly  bred  crosses  that  the  great  establishment  was  able  to 
furnish,  and  there  was  no  improvement  in  either  the  quality  or 


THE    HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

the  speed  of  the  produce.  From  this  it  is  evident  that  the- 
count  a;id  his  managers  were  at  that  period  entangled  in  the 
same  foolish  notions  that  befogged  the  minds  of  so  many  very 
worthy  gentlemen  in  this  country  some  years  ago,  viz.,  that  the 
way  to  improve  the  trotter  was  to  go  to  the  runner — the  horse 
that  never  could  trot.  This  foolish  notion,  that  never  had  a 
spark  of  reason  in  it,  naturally  and  necessarily  weakened  the 
trotting  instinct  of  the  descendants  of  Barss,  and  would  have 
wiped  it  all  out  if  it  had  been  followed  persistently,  and  there 
would  have  been  no  Orion*  trotters  to-day. 

After  this  narrow  escape  from  the  annihilation  of  much  of  the 
good  that  Barss  had  done,  the  management  then  began  to  look 
for  the  same  blood  and  the  same  habit  of  action  that  the  "Dutch 
Mare"  transmitted  to  her  son,  and,  with  this  element  to  the 
front,  progression  was  resumed.  Out  of  his  great  variety  of 
forms  and  of  strains  of  blood  the  count  and  his  managers  could 
pick  and  choose  for  the  size,  shape  and  forms  they  wanted,  but 
they  were  not  able  to  transfer  with  the  size,  shape  and  form  the 
instincts  and  psychical  nature  of  the  horse.  The  count  seems 
to  have  carried  forward  his  great  enterprise  rather  with  a  view 
to  experimentation  than  its  commercial  possibilities.  Smetanka, 
lived  but  a  year  or  two,  and  when  he  stumbled  upon  the  produc- 
tion of  Barss,  a  magnificent  individual  and  a  great  trotter,  his 
head  seems  to  have  been  turned,  as  he  evidently  supposed  that 
he  could  breed  any  kind  of  horse  he  wished  to  breed,  and  be  able 
to  do  anything  he  wished  him  to  do.  At  his  death,  in  1808,  he 
left  no  male  heir  to  succeed  him,  but  he  provided  in  his  will  that 
his  stud  should  not  be  dispersed.  It  was  kept  intact  till  about 
1845,  when  it  was  purchased  by  the  government,  and  finally 
divided  among  a  number  of  prominent  breeders  in  different  por- 
tions of  the  empire. 

Without  having  any  knowledge  on  the  subject  that  is  definite 
and  specific,  I  am  led  to  infer  that  the  rules  on  registration  and 
racing  in  Russia  are  a  hindrance  to  the  breeding  and  develop- 
ment of  the  trotter.  As  I  understand  it,  no  horse  can  be  regis- 
tered unless  he  is  purely  descended  from  Barss.  And  I  under- 
stand further,  that  he  must  possess  the  same  requirements  in 
order  to  enter  and  start  in  a  public  race  against  the  Orloffs.  If 
it  be  true  that  these  restrictions  are  really  in  existence  and  are 
enforced,  we  can  understand  why  the  American  trotter  is  so  far 
ahead  of  the  Orloff  in  speed  and  in  the  markets  of  Europe. 


THE   ORLOFF   TROTTER.  39  J' 

Orloff  is  restricted  to  certain  lines  of  blood  and  is  protected 
.against  competition  from  others  that  might  beat  hiii.  The 
American  is  free,  from  all  restrictions  of  blood  and  gathers  up 
all  that  is  best  and  fastest.  He  neither  asks  nor  accepts  protec- 
tion from  any  quarter,  but  throws  down  the  glove  to  all  comers. 

BELLFOUNDER  was  imported  from  England,  July,  1822,  by 
James  Boott,  of  Boston,  Mass.  He  was  placed  in  the  hands  of 
.Samuel  Jaques,  Jr. — a  very  shrewd  manager  who  understood  the 
use  of  printer's  ink  and  did  not  hesitate  about  employing  it  liber 
ally.  In  his  advertisement  for  1823  he  says:  "This  celebrated 
horse  is  a  bright  bay  with  black  legs,  standing  fifteen  hands 
high."  From  this  we  are  safe  in  concluding  he  was  not  more 
than  fifteen  hands,  and  from  another  contemporaneous  source 
it  is  learned  that  he  was  a  little  below  that  measurement.  On 
this  point  the  recollections,  or  perhaps  impressions,  of  Orange 
County  horsemen  are  not  very  trustworthy,  as  one  of  them  places 
his  height  at  sixteen  hands  and  others  at  fifteen  and  a  half. 
His  pedigree  was  given  on  the  card  which  was  distributed  by  his 
groom  in  the  form  following:  "Got  by  old  Bellfounder,  out 
of  Velocity  by  Haphazard,  by  Sir  Peter  out  of  Miss  Hervey 
T)y  Eclipse."  "Velocity  trotted  on  the  Norwich  road  in  1806, 
sixteen  miles  in  one  hour,  and  although  she  broke  five  times  into 
a  gallop,  and  as  often  turned  round,  she  won  her  match."  Al- 
though after  diligent  search  I  have  not  been  able  to  find  this 
performance  of  Velocity,  it  may  be  true  that  a  mare  so  named 
may  have  trotted  as  represented,  but  she  was  not  a  daughter  of 
Haphazard.  The  dates  make  this  utterly  impossible,  and  Mr. 
Jaques  was  smart  enough  never  to  put  this  humbug  pedigree  in 
his  elaborate  advertisements  that  appeared  in  the  leading  agricul- 
tural papers  of  the  country,  year  after  year. 

As  the  great  mass  of  people  of  that  day  knew  nothing  and 
cared  but  little  about  pedigrees,  the  astute  manager  of  the  horse 
struck  an  expedient  in  the  way  of  advertising  that  was  very 
•effective.  He  had  a  cut  made  of  a  horse  trotting  loose  on  the 
road,  at  the  rate  of  a  hurricane,  and  in  the  background  was  an 
•entablature  with  the  legend  "Seventeen  and  a  half  miles  an 
hour,"  which  anybody  and  everybody  would  interpret  to  mean 
that  this  was  a  record  made  by  imported  Bellfounder,  and  there 
he  was  doing  it.  This  cut  in  reduced  form  went  the  rounds  of 
the  agricultural  press,  and  in  1831  made  its  appearance  in  the 


398  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

''Family  Encyclopedia  of  Useful  Knowledge."  This  dodge  wa& 
exceedingly  effective,  and  as  it  appeared  in  a  book  it  must  be  true. 
Thousands  of  people  interpreted  the  picture  to  mean  that  im- 
ported Bellfounder  had  trotted  seventeen  and  a  half  miles  in  an 
hour.  Mr.  Jaques  did  not  say  this  in  letters  and  figures,  but  he 
said  it  even  more  plainly  in  a  picture.  The  basis  of  this  decep- 
tion is  found  in  the  advertisement  itself,  where,  in  speaking  of 
the  speed  of  old  Bellfounder  in  England,  he  says:  "  His 
owner  challenged  to  perform  with  him  seventeen  miles'ai  d  a  half 
in  one  hour,  but  it  was  not  accepted."  Here  we  have  a  possible 
challenge  of  the  sire  transmuted  into  an  actual  performance  of 
the  son,  for  the  sole  purpose  of  securing  public  patronage. 

There  can  be  no  doubt  that  this  horse  was  a  true  representative 
of  what  was  then  known  as  the  Norfolk  Trotters  and  at  this  time 
designated  as  Hackneys  or  Cubs.  Bellfounder  was  of  a  quiet, 
docile  disposition,  with  a  display  of  great  nervous  energy  in  his 
movements  when  aroused.  His  knee  and  hock  action  was  high 
and  showy,  giving  the  impression  of  a  great  trotter,  without 
much  speed.  At  several  points  his  form  was  measurably  repro- 
duced in  Hambletonian,  especially  in  his  low,  round  withers  and 
his  great,  meaty  buttocks.  In  seeing  these  points  so  plainly  de- 
veloped in  his  idol  it  is  not  remarkable  that  Mr.  Rysdyk  should 
have  placed  too  high  an  estimate  on  Bellfounder  blood  as  a  factor 
in  the  American  trotting  horse.  If  he  had  thoughtfully  asked 
himself  the  question,  What  has  Bellfounder  blood  done  in  its 
own  right  in  the  way  of  getting  trotters?  the  illusion  would  have 
vanished. 

Bellfounder  was  in  the  control  of  Mr.  Jaques  for  six  years,  and 
never  in  my  knowledge  of  trotting  stallions  have  I  known  one  so 
widely  and  successfully  advertised.  The  name  "Bellfounder" 
was  heard  and  known  everywhere.  From  1829  to  1833,  inclusive, 
he  was  under  the  control  of  Mr.  T.  T.  Kissam,  of  Long  Island. 
After  that  time  he  seems  to  have  gone  "a-begging"  wherever 
there  seemed  to  be  a  chance  to  earn  his  oats.  At  last,  at 
Jamaica,  Long  Island,  he  died,  having  made  twenty-one  seasons 
in  this  country — one  more  than  Messenger.  The  question  was 
once  raised  as  to  where  Hambletonian  got  his  aversion  to  the 
chestnut  color,  and  it  was  flippantly  assigned  to  Bellfounder. 
The  truth  is,  quite  a  number  of  Bellfounder's  get  were  chestnuts, 
perhaps  as  large  a  percentage  as  would  naturally  come  from  the 
average  stallion. 


THE    ORLOFF   TROTTER.  399 

It  is  the  testimony  of  several  gentlemen  who  were  familiar  with 
trotting  affairs  in  the  time  of  the  Bellfounders,  that  a  number  of 
them  were  skillfully  and  persistently  trained  and  none  of  them 
could  trot  faster  than  about  2 :50.  The  one  exception  to  this  fact  so 
widely  established  is  the  case  of  the  dam  of  Hambletoriian.  After 
this  filly  passed  into  the  hands  of  Peter  Seely  he  gave  some  at- 
tention irregularly  to  the  development  of  her  speed,  and  before 
he  sold  her  he  gave  her  two  trials  to  saddle  on  the  Union  Course 
and  she  trotted  in  2:43  and  2:41.  As  she  was  then  but  four  years 
old  it  is  safe  to  conclude  that  she  would  have  made  a  trotter,  be- 
yond all  doubt.  This  is  the  only  one,  old  or  young,  from  the 
loins  of  Bellfounder  that  ever  trotted  so  fast.  I  once  put  the 
question  directly  to  Mr.  Rysdyk  as  to  whether  the  Kent  Mure 
was  as  good  and  as  fast  as  her  dam,  One  Eye,  and  he  promptly  re- 
plied that  One  Eye  was  much  the  faster  and  greater  mare.  To 
this  answer  he  added  that  One  Eye,  under  the  same  circum- 
stances, would  have  been  the  equal  of  Lady  Thorn  or  any  other 
that  ever  lived.  This  may  account  for  the  superiority  of  the 
Kent  Mare  over  all  the  other  Bellfounders,  and  it  may  account 
for  the  superiority  of  Hambletonian  over  all  other  stallions. 

BELLFOUXDER  (BRONVX'S  OR  KISSAM'S),  was  a  bay  horse,  foaled 
1830,  got  by  imported  Bellfounder;  dam  Lady  Alport,  by  Mam- 
brino,  son  of  Messenger;  grandam  by  Tippoo,  son  of  Messenger; 
great-grandam  by  imported  Messenger.  With  such  breeding  he 
should  have  been  a  great  horse.  He  was  bred  by  Timothy  T. 
Kissam,  of  Long  Island,  and  sold  along  with  a  full  brother  one  year 
younger,  named  Bellport,  about  1834-5,  to  L.  F.  and  A.  B.  Allen, 
of  Buffalo^  New  York.  Bellfounder  was  a  bay  horse,  sixteen 
hands  high,  and  Bellport  was  sixteen  and  one-half  hands,  but  was 
poisoned  and  died  at  four  years  old.  Bellfounder  passed  into 
the  hands  of  some  parties  at  Cleveland  and  then  to  Mr.  Brown,  of 
Columbus,  Ohio,  made  most  of  his  seasons  in  that  portion  of  the 
State,  and  died  September,  1860.  This  was  altogether  the  most 
valuable  son  the  imported  horse  left — indeed  the  only  one  that 
made  any  mark  in  the  world.  He  was  not  much  of  a  trotter  and 
did  not  get  trotters,  but  got  colts  that  were  excellent  types  of 
the  coach  horse,  and  for  that  purpose  was  very  highly  esteemed. 
Some  of  his  sons  and  daughters,  especially  the  latter,  are  met 
with  sometimes  in  trotting  records  as  having  produced  some- 
thing that  had  more  or  less  speed. 

COXQUEROR  was  a  bay  gelding,  foaled  1842,  and  got  by  Lat- 


400  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

tourett's  Bellfounder,  a  grandson  of  the  imported  horse,  and  out 
of  Lady  McClain  by  imported  Bellfounder,  and  she  out  of  Lady 
Webber  by  Mambrino,  and  she  out  of  a  mare  brought  from 
Dutchess  County  and  represented  to  be  a  daughter  of  imported 
Messenger.  This  gelding  had  been  pounded  about  in  slow  races 
for  years  and  had  the  reputation  of  being  a  stayer.  In  1853  a 
match  was  made  with  him  to  trot  a  hundred  miles  in  nine  hours. 
The  race  was  started  and  the  horse  won  in  8h.  55m.  and  53s., 
and  he  died  three  or  four  days  afterward.  This  is  the  only  in- 
stance that  I  know  of  in  which  the  advocates  of  Hackney  blood 
can  point  to  a  trotting  record  made  in  this  or  indeed  in  any 
other  country. 

In  closing  the  account  of  this  family — for  out  of  courtesy  we 
have  called  it  a  "family" — we  find  we  have  nothing  left  but  a 
name  with  nothing  in  it.  The  name  that  was  more  widely  known 
than  that  of  any  other  horse  of  his  generation  has  now  practi- 
cally ceased  from  the  earth,  with  nobody  so  poor  as  to  do  it 
reverence. 

The  type  of  horse  now  known  as  the  "Hackney"  is  found 
chiefly  in  the  shires  bordering  the  northeastern  coast  of  England 
— Norfolk,  Lincoln  and  Yorkshire.  The  name  now  given  is  not 
only  new  but  it  is  appropriate  and  applies  to  any  one  part  of 
England  as  well  as  another,  and  applies  to  any  one  horse,  suited 
to  the  general  use  of  a  Hack,  as  well  as  another,  no  difference 
what  his  blood  or  what  his  country.  The  name  "Norfolk  Trot- 
ter" fifty  or  a  hundred  years  ago  was  often  applied  to  horses  of 
this  type  coming  from  that  part  of  the  country,  but.  it  did  not 
follow  that  they  were  "trotters."  In  the  discussions  of  the  asso- 
ciation preceding  the  adoption  of  a  name  it  was  urged  that  the 
qualifying  word  "trotter"  would  imply  the  ability  to  trot  fast, 
and  as  the  material  to  be  registered  could  not  do  this,  it  would 
subject  the  whole  movement  to  ridicule  and  contempt.  It  was 
also  urged  that  the  name  "Norfolk"  would  give  that  particular 
region  an  advantage  over  all  other  parts  of  England  in  the  pros- 
pective sales  of  registered  stock,  and  thus  the  old  title  was  fully 
disposed  of.  When  the  name  "cob"  was  suggested,  it  was  con- 
ceded that  it  represented  just  what  they  had,  but  it  was  too  com- 
mon, as  everybody  in  all  England,  rich  and  poor,  had  "cobs." 
Then  came  the  term  "Hackney,"  which  meant  the  same  kind  of 
a  horse  as  the  cob,  but  as  it  was  not  in  such  universal  use  it  was 


THE    ORLOFF   TROTTER.  40i 

adopted.  On  this  point  it  must  be  admitted  that  it  is  an  honest 
name. 

The  Hackney  is  a  good  horse  for  all  the  uses  to  which  he  is 
adapted.  He  is  short  on  his  legs  and  stout,  with  a  good  share  of 
nervous  energy.  He  is  symmetrical,  and,  we  might  say,  hand- 
some, if  we  can  use  that  word  without  any  show  of  fine  breeding, 
for  he  is  far  short  of  the  ideal  blood  horse.  But  he  is  not  a  sad- 
dle horse,  he  is  not  a  hunter,  he  is  not  a  runner,  and  he  is  not  a 
trotter.  As  against  these  desirable  and  useful  qualifications,  he  has 
been  bred  and  trained  when  in  action  to  jerk  up  his  limbs  to  the 
highest  point  anatomically  possible,  and  put  them  down  again 
with  a  thud  at  a  point  but  little  removed  from  where  he  started. 
In  this  showy,  undesirable  action  he  exhausts  his  nervous  energy, 
pounding  the  earth  without  covering  much  of  the  distance.  In  this 
excessive  knee  action  every  element  of  easy,  graceful  and  rapid 
progression  is  wanting.  This  fad  will  have  its  day  and  then  along 
with  the  barbarous  excision  of  the  caudal  appendage  they  will 
disappear  together  as  they  came,  and  we  will  know  them  no  more 
forever. 

There  are  two  points  in  advocating  the  merits  of  the  Hackney 
with  which  every  Englishman  is  thoroughly  familiar  and  which 
lie  will  call  to  your  attention  on  the  slightest  provocation:  (1) 
Bellfounder  was  a  Hackney  and  it  was  his  blood  that  gave  us  the 
greatest  trotting  sire  that  the  world  has  ever  produced.  This  is 
the  Englishman's  estimate  of  Bellfounder  when  he  has  a  Hackney 
for  sale,  and  especially  if  the  prospective  purchaser  be  an  Ameri- 
can. (2)  He  is  descended  from  a  long  line  of  distinguished 
trotters.  To  the  first  of  these  reiterated  and  parrot-like  claims 
an  answer  will  be  found  in  the  chapter  relating  to  that  horse, 
where  his  twenty-one  years  of  stud  service  have  been  carefully 
considered,  and  where  he  is  shown  to  have  been  a  monumental 
failure.  In  the  second  claim  there  is  some  truth  and  we  must 
consider  it  very  briefly. 

Of  all  the  elements  entering  into  the  families  of  horses  locally 
and  indefinitely  called  Norfolk  Trotters,  there  were  two  that 
might  be  looked  upon  as  the  founders — Useful  Cub  and  Shales — 
for  they  were  more  conspicuous  and  valuable  than  any  others. 
Mr.  John  Lawrence  was  not  only  a  practical  horseman,  but  he 
was  the  most  intelligent  and  reliable  of  all  the  writers  on  the 
horse  in  the  latter  part  of  the  last  century.  He  was  the  only 
one  who  gave  any  attention  to  the  trotter  and  trotting  affairs. 


402  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

He  says:  "To  old  Shales  and  Useful  Cub  the  Isle  of  Ely,  Cam- 
bridgeshire and  Norfolk  are  indebted  for  their  fame  in  the  pro- 
duction of  capital  Hackneys."  Useful  Cub  was  bred  by  Thomas 
Jenkinson,  of  Long  Sutton  in  Lincolnshire,  and  was  foaled  about 
1865-70,  and  was  got-  by  a  Suffolk  cart  horse,  doubtless  a  light 
weight,  and  his  dam  was  by  Golden  Farmer,  a  son  of  the  famous 
half-bred  Sampson,  that  was  the  great-grandsire  of  Messenger 
and  beat  most  of  the  best  horses  of  his  day.  Mr.  Lawrence  knew 
Useful  Cub  well,  and  was  beaten  by  him  in  Hyde  Park.  'Ws 
have  no  details  of  this  horse's  performances,  but  it  seems  to  be 
conceded  that  he  trotted  fifteen,  sixteen  and  seventeen  miles  in 
the  hour.  Old  Shales,  or  Scott's  Shales,  as  he  is  sometimes 
called,  is  described  by  Lawrence  as  "the  bastard  son  of  Blank," 
son  of  Godolphin  Arabian,  but  Mr.  Euren,  the  compiler  of  the 
Hackney  Stud  Book  maintains  that  he  was  the  son  of  Blaze  and 
not  the  son  of  Blank.  The  reasons  given  for  this  change  I  do 
not  remember,  but  they  would  have  to  be  well  founded  before  I 
could  throw  overboard  the  contemporaneous  evidence  of  Mr. 
Lawrence.  It  will  not  do  to  say  that  Mr.  Lawrence  mistook  the 
name  Blaze  for  Blank  and  so  wrote  it  by  mistake,  for  he  knew 
all  about  both  horses.  This  distinction,  however,  is  of  but  little 
practical  value.  The  horses  Shales  and  Useful  Cub  were  both  fast 
and  successful  trotters,  in  their  day,  and  they  both  became  dis- 
tinguished sires  of  trotters.  By  this  I  do  not  mean  that  they 
were  the  sires  of  all  the  trotters,  for  there  were  many  that  were 
wholly  unknown  in  their  breeding. 

Judging  from  the  numbers  of  leading  contests  that  were  re- 
ported in  the  Sporting  Magazine  and.  other  publications,  we  must 
conclude  that  trotting  contests  reached  their  height  as  well  in 
numbers  as  in  public  interest  about  the  last  decade  in  the  last 
century.  The  contests  were  all  to  saddle,  on  the  road,  and  the 
leading  ones  were  made  under  the  watch  and  over  a  long  distance 
of  ground,  specifying  such  or  such  a  distance  to  be  made  inside 
of  an  hour.  To  form  a  correct  estimate  of  the  speed  of  those 
horses,  I  will  copy  one  paragraph,  entire,  from  the  description 
given  by  Mr.  Lawrence  concerning  his  own  mare  Betty  Bloss: 

"My  own  brown  rnare,  known  by  the  name  of  Betty  Bloss,  was  the  slowest 
of  all  the  capital  trotters,  but  at  five  years  old  trotted  fifteen  miles  in  ODD 
hour,  carrying  fourteen  stone,  although  fairly  mistress  of  no  more  than  ten. 
She  afterward  trotted  sixteen  miles  within  the  hour,  with  ten  stone,  with 
much  ease  to  herself  and  her  rider.  She  was  nearly  broken  down  at  four 


THE    ORLOFF   TROTTER.  403 

years  old,  bad  bad  feet,  and,  besides,  too  mucb  blood  for  a  trotter,  baving  been 
got  by  Sir  Hale's  Commoner,  out  of  a  tbree-part-bred  daugbter  of  Rattle,  son 
of  Snip." 

In  this  paragraph,  from  the  best-informed  man  of  his  genera- 
tion, it  will  be  noted  incidentally  that  the  cry,  "no  more  running 
blood  in  the  trotter,"  is  not  new,  but  more  than  a  hundred  years 
old.  The  best  performances  were  about  sixteen  miles  in  the 
hour,  but  there  was  an  occasional  one  that  reached  sixteen  and 
a  half.  A  black  gelding  called  Archer  was  recognized  as  the  fast- 
est of  that  period,  and  on  one  occasion  under  a  stop  watch  he  trotted 
the  second  one  of  two  miles  in  a  little  less  than  three  minutes. 
From  my  gleanings  I  find  but  a  single  instance  from  which  we 
might  be  able  to  approximate  the  money  value  of  trotting  horses  of 
that  day,  and  this  is  given  as  a  phenomenal  price,  viz.,  Marshland 
Shales,  a  paternal  grandson  of  the  original  Shales  and  out  of  a 
mare  by  Hue  and  Cry.  He  .had  beaten  Reed's  Driver  in  a  match 
of  seventeen  miles  for  200  guineas.  He  was  foaled  1802  and  in 
1812  he  was  sold  at  auction  for  3,051  guineas — $15,255.  He  was  a 
great  horse,  but  this  price  was  just  as  startling  to  Englishmen  of 
that  day  as  the  $105,000  was  in  our  own  day,  when  Axtell  was 
sold.  This  seems  to  have  been  the  culmination  of  the  "boom" 
in  Norfolk  Trotters,  and  from  then  till  the  present  there  has  been 
a  steady  deterioration  in  the  trotting  step  of  the  Norfolk  horse. 
In  the  earlier  part  of  this  period  of  eighty  or  ninety  years,  possi- 
bly some  exceptions  may  be  found,  but  they  are  only  individual 
exceptions  and  do  not  controvert  the  broad  fact  that  must  be  ap- 
parent to  all  observers.  They  had  been  breeding  and  training 
their  horses  to  strike  their  chins  with  their  knees — the  up-and- 
down  motion — instead  of  getting  away  and  covering  some  ground 
in  their  action.  I  have  stood  and  watched  scores  of  them  in  the 
show-ring,  on  their  native  heath,  with  their  grooms  at  the  ends 
of  long  lines  running  and  yelling  like  wild  Indians  to  rouse  up 
their  horses,  and  they  called  this  training  the  trotters.  When  I 
privately  expressed  the  wish  that  saddles  might  be  put  on  a  few 
of  the  best  and  the  ring  cleared  so  that  the  trotting  action  might 
be  studied,  I  was  very  kindly  and  politely  assured  that  they  did 
not  show  their  trotters  that  way  in  England.  Thus  with  the 
taut  check-rein,  the  long  leading-line  and  the  whoops  of  the 
groom  they  got  the  up-and-down  action  upon  the  perfection  of 
which  the  prizes  were  awarded.  This  explained  why  the  splendid 


404  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

foundation  of  a  breed  had  been  lost  by  non-use  and  why  England 
had  produced  no  trotters  in  the  past  fifty  or  eighty  years. 

While  our  English  cousins  know  they  have  no  trotting  horses 
of  their  own  they  seem  to  be  exceedingly  anxious,  possibly  for 
commercial  reasons,  to  make  it  appear  that  the  American  trot- 
ting horse  is  the  lineal  descendant  of  the  Norfolk  Trotter.  This 
effort  is  not  restricted  to  the  idle  twaddle  about  Bell  ounder, 
which  everybody  on  this  side  of  the  Atlantic  estimates  at  its  true 
value,  but  it  has  taken  an  official  and  wider  range,  which,  trifling 
though  it  be,  my  duty  as  a  historian  impels  me  to  expose.  Mr. 
Henry  F.  Euren,  the  compiler  of  the  Hackney  Stud  Book,  wrote 
to  the  Commissioner  of  Agriculture,  at  Washington,  D.  0.,  in 
1888,  taking  exceptions  to  some  conclusions  reached  in  an  article 
written  by  Mr.  Leslie  E.  Macleod,  in  my  office,  on  "The  National 
Horse  of  America,"  and  published  in  the  report  of  the  Depart- 
ment of  Agriculture  for  1887;  Mr.  Euren  claiming  that  the  Amer- 
ican trotting  horse  came  originally  from  Norfolk,  in  England. 
In  proof  of  this  he  says:  "I  beg  to  inclose  you  a  cutting  which 
confirms  my  idea."  And  now  for  the  "cutting"  which  he  offers 
as  proof: 

"It  appears  from  an  Act  of  Parliament,  passed  December  6,  1748,  in  the 
Legislature  of  the  State  of  New  Jersey,  America,  that  on  and  after  the  publi- 
cation of  this  Act,  all  Norfolk  pacing  or  trotting  of  horses  for  lucre  or  gain, 
or  for  any  sum  or  sums  of  money  at  any  time  (excepting  such  times  as  are 
hereafter  expressly  provided  for  by  this  Act),  shall  be  and  are  hereby  declared 
public  nuisances,  provided  always  that  at  all  fairs  that  are  or  may  be  held  with- 
in this  province,  and  that  on  the  first  working  day  after  the  three  great  festivals 
of  Christmas,  Easter  and  Whitsuntide,  etc.,  etc." 

The  act  passed  by  the  provincial  legislature  of  the  colony  of 
New  Jersey  in  1748  embraced  very  stringent  regulations  against 
dice,  lotteries,  etc.,  as  well  as  horse  racing.  It  is  divided  into 
several  sections,  and  at  Section  4  we  reach  the  provision  against 
racing  as  follows: 

"And  be  it  further  enacted  by  the  authority  aforesaid  that  after  ihe 
publication  of  this  Act,  all  horse  racing,  pacing  or  trotting  of  horses  for  lucre 
or  gain,  or  for  any  sum  or  sums  of  money  at  any  time  (excepting  such  times 
as  are  hereafter  expressly  provided  for  and  allowed  by  this  Act),  shall  be  and 
are  hereby  declared  public  nuisances,  and  shall  be  prosecuted  as  public 
nuisances,  in  manner  hereinbefore  directed.  Provided  always,  and  it  is  the 
true  intent  and  meaning  of  this  Act,  that  at  all  fairs  that  are  or  may  be  held 
within  this  province,  and  that  on  the  first  working  day  after  the  three  grand 
festivals  of  Christmas,  Easter  and  Whitsuntide,  etc.,  etc." 


THE    ORLOFF   TROTTER.  405 

These  quotations  are  sufficiently  extended  to  afford  an  unmis- 
takable comparison,  and  on  their  face  evidence  that  cannot  be 
doubted  for  one  moment  that  they  both  purport  to  be  copied 
from  the  same  act  of  the  Jersey  Colonial  legislature.  In  the 
official  printed  copy  which  is  before  me  as  I  write,  the  mandate 
is  against  "all  horse  racing,  pacing  or  trotting  of  horses  for 
lucre  or  gain."  In  Mr.  Euren's  "cutting"  the  mandate  is 
against  "all  Norfolk  pacing  or  trotting  of  horses  for  lucre  or 
gain,"  etc.  The  substitution  of  the  word  "Norfolk"  instead  of 
"horse  racing,"  is  in  the  nature  of  a  forgery,  and  I  cannot  be- 
lieve that  Mr.  Euren  would  be  guilty  of  any  such  execrable 
piece  of  trickery.  It  must  have  been  conceived  and  written  by 
some  horse  sharp  who  was  trying  to  sell  a  Hackney  to  an  Ameri- 
can with  a  pocket  full  of  money,  and  after  he  had  effected  his  sale 
he  could  mutter  quietly,  when  at  a  safe  distance  from  his  victim, 
the  couplet  from  "Hudibras:" 

"The  paltry  story  is  untrue 
And  forged  to  cheat  such  gulls  as  you." 

Unfortunately,  however,  for  Mr.  Euren,  he  indorsed  the 
trick,  and  not  only  indorsed  it,  but  sent  it  to  the  Commissioner 
of  Agriculture  with  the  hope  and  possible  expectation  that  it 
would  receive  public  recognition  and  become  part  of  the  horse 
history  of  this  country.  Did  he  not  know  that  somebody  would 
be  nosing  round  among  the  old  laws  and  expose  the  dirty  decep- 
tion? But,  on  the  basis  that  Mr.  Euren  was  deceived  by  this 
wretched  interpolation  of  a  fraud  into  the  law,  could  he  not  see 
that  the  date  of  the  law — 1748 — was  before  old  Shales  or  Useful 
Cub  was  foaled,  and  long  before  the  very  first  "Norfolk  trotter" 
was  ever  heard  of  either  in  Norfolk  or  in  any  other  part  of  Eng- 
land? 

The  exposure  of  this  foolish  attempt,  wherever  it  originated,  to 
incorporate  into  an  old  New  Jersey  statute  a  fiction,  or  a  forgery, 
as  it  may  be  called,  carries  with  it  a  punishment  that  should  be 
felt  by  the  most  unscrupulous  of  horse  sharps;  but  when  we  find 
it  unequivocally  indorsed  and  given  to  the  world  as  true  by 
the  compiler  of  the  Hackney  Stud  Book,  it  destroys  all  confi- 
dence in  the  accuracy  and  reliability  of  that  work.  This  is  a 
misfortune  that  the  friends  of  the  Hackney  in  England  as  well  as 
in  this  country  must  feel  as  a  blow  at  the  value  of  the  whole 
interest.  Opinions  may  change  with  new  light,  and  opposing 


406  THE   HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

conclusions  may  be  honestly  reached  from  different  standpoints, 
but  running  against  a  fixed  and  certain  date,  as  in  this  case,  is 
like  running  against  a  two-edged  sword. 

In  conclusion,  the  Hackney  is  merely  the  dear-bought  and  far- 
fetched fashion  of  the  hour.  A  few  years  ago  he  was  "something 
new  in  horses,"  just  as  the  modiste  has  "something  new  in 
'dresses."  He  was  found  in  England,  where  there  are  no  flies, 
without  a  tail,  and  as  that  was  the  fashion  in  England  we  must 
have  horses  in  America  without  tails,  notwithstanding  the  mil- 
lions of  torments  they  have  to  endure  without  the  natural  means 
of  defense.  As  hack-a-bouts  they  are  good  horses,  but  their 
"churn-dasher"  style  of  action  will  never  become  acceptable  to 
the  American  people. 

A  few  years  since  a  quite  persistent  attempt,  backed  by  un- 
limited wealth  and  all  the  prestige  that  metropolitan  "fashion" 
-and  "society"  could  bestow,  was  made,  particularly  in  New 
York,  to  create  a  Hackney  "boom"  in  America.  All  that  element 
in  the  social  life  of  our  great  cities  that  affects  a  disdain  for 
things  distinctively  American,  and  particularly  for  American 
horses,  and  that  glories  in  the  stultifying  habit  of  aping  things 
"English,  ye  know,"  took  up  the  Hackney  fad  with  unbounded 
enthusiasm.  As  a"  park  and  road  horse  the  American  horse — the 
incomparable  trotting-bred  driver — was  to  be  incontinently 
crowded  out  of  the  driveways,  the  markets  and  the  shows.  The 
National  Horse  Show  Association,  whose  annual  show  at  Madi- 
son Square  Garden  is  the  great  social  fete  of  the  year  in  New 
York,  lent  all  its  powerful  influence  to  forward  the  Hackney 
"boom,"  which  was,  it  must  in  fairness  be  said,  consistent;  for 
the  miscalled  National  Horse  Show  has  always  catered  more  to 
foreign  horses  and  foreign  customs  in  horsemanship  than  to 
American  horses  and  horsemen.  Men  of  great  wealth  and  prom- 
inence established  extensive  Hackney  studs,  imported  famous 
prize- winning  stallions  and  mares,  and  there  was  only  one  thing 
left  to  be  done,  and  that  was  to  convert  the  American  people  to 
the  belief  that  the  driving  horse  they  had  been  breeding  and 
•developing  with  a  special  purpose  and  care — the  fleetest  and  most 
versatile  harness  horse  in  the  world — was  inferior  to  an  imported 
nondescript.  In  that  attempt  the  Hackney  advocates  have  failed 
in  America  as  completely  as  did  Mr.  Blunt  and  others  in  Eng- 
land, when  they  sought  to  make  racing  men  believe  that  the 
Arab  was  a  better  race  horse  than  the  English  thoroughbred. 


THE    ORLOFF   TROTTER.  407 

Perhaps  nothing  illustrates  better  what  I  have  called  the 
versatility  of  the  trotter  than  this  contest  with  the  Hackney  in 
the  latter's  own  especial  field — if  he  may  be  said  to  have  any. 
Of  course  there  could  be  no  contest  between  the  horse  of  a  special 
breed  and  the  nondescript  as  a  harness  horse  for  speed  or  useful- 
ness on  the  road,  whether  the  distance  were  half  a  mile  or  a 
hundred  miles;  but  in  the  show-ring  the  Hackney  men  claimed 
absolute  pre-eminence  for  their  "high-acting"  horses.  They 
did  not  dare  contest  with  the  trotter  in  the  matter  of  road  speed, 
so  to  have  any  contest  at  all  the  trotting  horse  men  had  to 
"carry  the  war  into  Africa."  This  they  have  done  with  a  venge- 
ance. They  have  taken  the  pure-bred  trotting  horse,  dressed 
him  in  the  fashion  dictated  by  the  Hackney  "faddists,"  taught 
him  the  Hackney  tricks,  the  preposterous  Hackney  action  and  all 
that,  and  have  beaten  the  Hackneys  not  once  but  time  and  again 
right  on  their  own  ground,  viz.,  at  the  National  Horse  Show  in 
Madison  Square  Garden.  In  almost  all  cases  in  classes  where 
trotters  have  been  admitted  to  compete  with  Hackneys,  the 
former  have  carried  off  the  honors  within  the  past  two  years. 
Many  notable  instances  might  be  cited,  but  one  will  suffice.  At 
the  National  Horse  Show,  1896,  a  class  was  offered  for  "half-bred 
Hackneys,"  sires  to  be  shown  with  four  of  their  get.  The  Hack- 
ney end  of  the  argument  was  upheld  by  Mr.  A.  J.  Cassatt's  re- 
nowned prize-winner,  imported  Cadet,  with  four  of  his  get. 
Against  him  was  entered  the  well-known  trotting  sire  Almoiit 
Jr.,  2:26,  with  four  of  his  get,  and  though  the  judges  were  gen- 
tlemen identified  more  or  less  with  the  Hackney  interest,  so 
superior  in  form,  action  and  style  were  the  four  youngsters  by 
the  trotting  sire  that  they  carried  away  the  honors  from  the 
chosen  progeny  of  one  of  the  most  noted  Hackney  show  horses  in 
the  world. 

In  the  sale  ring  this  verdict  has  been  corroborated.  The 
highest  prices — the  record  figures — paid  in  the  fashionable  New 
York  market  for  park  horses,  "high  steppers,"  or  by  whatever 
name  the  merely  spectacular  harness  horse  may  from  time  to 
time  be  called,  have  been  paid  for  trotting-bred  horses:  and  in 
advertised  sales  of  "Hackneys"  it  has  become  somewhat  common 
to  encounter  half-trotting-bred  and  full-trotting-bred  horses. 

While  no  genuine  American  and  horseman  can  without  regret 
see  a  typical  American  horse  mutilated  and  his  action  perverted 
in  the  manner  required  to  bring  him  into  "Hackney"  classes  at 


408  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

the  National  Horse  Show,  or  in  the  markets  where  New  York 
society  people  buy  their  stub-tailed  horses,  it  is  some  compensa- 
tion to  know  that  these  experiments  have  demonstrated  the 
superiority  of  the  American-bred  horse  even  in  the  field  claimed 
as  especially  that  of  the  Hackney.  And  the  Hackney  "fad"  in 
America,,  while  it  lasted,  accomplished  a  good  end  in  so  far  as  it 
directed  the  attention  of  American  breeders  more  to  the  impor- 
tance of  form  and  style,  and  taught  them  that  in  their  own  trot- 
ting families  they  have  the  material  from  which  may  best  be 
produced,  in  form  and  style  and  quality  as  well  as  in  speed,, 
pre-eminently  the  most  excellent  park  horses  in  the  world. 


CHAPTER  XXIX. 

INVESTIGATION   OF   DISPUTED   PEDIGREES. 

Tendency  to  misrepresentation — The  Bald  Galloway  and  Darley  Arabian — 
Godolphin  Arabian  —  Early  experiences  with  trotting  pedigrees — Mr. 
Backinan's  honest  methods — Shanghai  Mary — Capt.  Rynders  and  Widow 
Machree  —  Woodburn  Farm  and  its  pedigree  methods — Victimized  by 
"horse  sharps"  and  pedigree  makers — Alleged  pedigree  of  Pilot  Jr. 
conclusively  overthrown — Pedigrees  of  Edwin  Forrest.  Norman,  Bay 
Chief  and  Black  Rose — Maud  S.'s  pedigree  exhaustively  considered — Cap- 
tain John  W.  Russell  never  owned  tbe  inare  Maria  Russell — The  deadly 
parallel  columns  settle  it. 

A  FEW  years  more  than  forty  have  slipped  away  since  I  first 
began  to  give  serious  attention  to  the  subject  of  horse  history 
and  to  contribute  an  occasional  article  to  the  press  on  that  sub- 
ject. Among  my  very  earliest  observations,  or  I  might  say,  ex- 
periences, was  the  realization  of  the  fact  that  exaggeration  as  a 
Mbit  of  thought  and  utterance  was  practically  universal  among 
Norsemen.  Sometimes  I  have  thought  this  tendency  to  the  un- 
true resulted  from  the  ammoniacal  exhalations  of  the  stable,  but 
this  thought  is  not  a  satisfactory  solution,  for  some  of  the  great- 
est liars  about  horses  have  never  known  anything  about  stables. 
Then, 'again,  I  have  thought  that  a  really  skillful  metaphysician 
might  write  a  learned  disquisition  of  the  question  and  satisfy 
himself  as  to  the  cause  of  this  moral  delinquency,  but  nobody 
would  be  able  to  understand  him  when  he  had  completed  it. 
This  wretched  vice,  so  prevalent  everywhere,  was  not  restricted 
to  the  professional  country  "hoss  jockey,"  ready  to  "swap"  with 
every  man  he  met  on  the  road,  but  it  reached  up  to  men  of 
otherwise  excellent  character,  and  these  men  would  "stretch  the 
blanket''  tremendously  about  the  blood  and  other  qualities  of 
the  horses  they  were  selling.  The  only  way  we  can  account  for 
an  otherwise  honest  and  truthful  man  exaggerating  the  merits 
and  blood  of  his  horses  must  be  (1)  in  the  fact  that  he  has  be- 
come attached  to  him  and  thinks  him  better  than  he  is,  or  it  may 
l>e  (2)  that  he  bought  with  a  false  pedigree  and  without  examin- 


410  THE   HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

ing  it,  he  assumes  it  is  true  and  represents  it  accordingly.  But 
underlying  all  this,  the  representation  cannot  be  disproved,  and 
(3)  it  may  add  to  the  market  value  of  the  horse. 

This  weakness  of  human  nature,  so  pervasive  of  all'  interests 
connected  with  the  horse,  did  not  originate  in  this  country,  but 
came  from  the  old  world.  We  inherit  it  from  our  ancestors. 
"The  fathers  have  eaten  a  sour  grape  and  the  children's  teeth 
are  set  on  edge."  Take  the  case  of  the  little  bald-faced,  pacing- 
bred  horse  known  in  the  old  records  as  "The  Bald  Galloway"  and 
while  it  is  Dot  probable  he  had  a  single  drop  of  Saracenic  blood 
in  his  veins,  he  is  fitted  out  with  a  grand  pedigree,  full  of  that 
blood.  Although  I  have  already  referred  to  this  horse  as  an  ex- 
emplification of  the  dishonesty  of  the  early  records  of  English 
pedigrees,  I  will  again  look  at  it  in  a  more  specific  manner.  He 
was  nothing  more  nor  less  than  a  little  native  horse,  belonging 
to  a  tribe  of  noted  pacers  in  the  southwestern  part  of  Scotland 
and  in  the  northern  part  of  England.  These  Galloways  were 
probably  the  very  last  remnant  of  pacers  to  be  found  in  Great 
Britain.  He  is  represented  in  the  books  to  have  been  by  a  horse 
called  "St.  Victor's  Barb;"  dam  by  Whynot;  grandam  a  Royal 
Mare.  The  Bald  Galloway  was  foaled  not  later  than  1708,  and  it 
was  probably  a  few  years  earlier.  His  reputed  sire,  "St.  Victor's. 
Barb,"  is  not  to  be  found  anywhere  and  was  probably  fictitious. 
His  dam  was  represented  to  be  by  Whynot,  and  this  horse  was  not 
foaled  till  1744 — thirty-six  years  after  his  grandson  was  foaled. 
The  grandam  is  given  as  a  "Royal  Mare,"  which  in  that  day 
was  a  convenient  way  of  rounding  out  a  pedigree,  just  as  we  now 
attempt  to  round  them  out  when  we  know  nothing  of  the  blood 
by  saying  "dam  thoroughbred."  "The  Bald  Galloway"  was  one 
of  the  most  successful  stallions  of  his  day,  and  yet  he  was  noth- 
ing in  the  world  but  a  good  representative  of  the  old  pacing  Gal- 
loways of  that  portion  of  Scotland  then  called  Galloway.  He 
was  low  in  stature,  but  he  was  esteemed  as  one  of  the  greatest 
and  most  valuable  racing  sires  of  his  generation:  One  of  his 
sons — the  Carlisle  Gelding — was  still  a  race  horse  when  he  was 
eighteen  years  old. 

"The  Darley  Arabian"  was  contemporaneous  with  the  Bald 
Galloway,  and  they  commenced  service  in  England  about  the 
same  year.  It  is  said  he  was  brought  from  Aleppo,  in  Syria,  or, 
perhaps  I  had  better  say  Asia  Minor.  Aleppo  is  but  a  short  dis- 
tance from  the  borders  of  ancient  Cappadocia  and  Cilicia,  coun- 


INVESTIGATION    OF    DISPUTED    PEDIGREES.  411 

tries  that  were  famous  in  history  for  the  great  numbers  of  fine 
horses  that  they  produced  far  more  than  a  thousand  years  before 
the  first  horse  was  taken  to  Arabia.  This  horse  is  called  an 
"Arabian,"  and  in  the  brief  record  of  his  importation  we  have 
the  same  venerable  "chestnut"  served  up  to  us  that  has  served 
so  many  generations  of  speculators  in  "Arabian  blood."  The 
record  says  that  Mr.  Darley  had  a  brother  who  was  an  agent  for 
merchandise  abroad,  who  "became  a  member  of  a  hunting  club, 
by  which  means  he  acquired  interest  to  procure  this  horse." 
This  "gag"  has  been  played  too  often  to  give  eclat  to  horses 
claimed  to  be  brought  from  Arabia,  in  the  past  two  hundred 
years,  to  have  much  effect  on  the  minds  of  people  who  have  any 
sense.  That  it  required  great  social  or  political  influence  to  in- 
duce the  old  Arab  sheik  to  part  with  him,  was  intended  merely 
to  secure  the  attention  of  prospective  customers  to  his  superla- 
tive excellence  in  order  to  obtain  their  patronage.  This  horse 
probably  never  was  within  five  hundred  miles  of  the  nearest  part 
of  Arabia,  and  to  call  him  an  Arabian  is  a  misnomer  wholly  un- 
justifiable. He  came  from  a  country  where  horses  were  abundant 
and  cheap  on  all  sides,  and  of  a  quality  far  superior  to  any 
Arabian.  He  was  simply  a  Turk,  he  was  for  sale,  and  it  required 
no  influence  to  buy  him  except  the  contents  of  the  purchaser's 
purse.  This  horse  has  always  been  classed  as  one  of  the  two 
great  founders  of  the  English  race  horse.  His  progeny  from 
well-bred  mares  were  not  numerous,  and  his  greatest  distinction 
is  in  the  fact  that  he  was  the  sire  of  Flying  Childers.  In  accord- 
ance with  the  truth,  he  should  be  known  in  the  records  as 
"Parley's  Turk." 

The  horse  bearing  the  dishonest  misnomer  of  "Godolphin 
Arabian"  was  really  the  greatest  regenerator  and  upbuilder  of 
the  running  horse  that  England  ever  possessed.  There  seems  to 
be  no  historical  doubt  that  he  was  brought  from  France,  and  that 
is  all  we  know  about  his  origin  and  early  history.  It  may  be  laid 
down,  therefore,  as  a  safe  proposition,  that  the  odds  are  as  a  thou- 
sand to  one  that  he  was  a  French  horse.  The  only  evidence  that 
can  ever  be  furnished  as  to  the  strain  of  blood  that  he  may  have 
possessed  must  be  found  and  studied  in  his  portrait,  which  ap- 
pears in  this  volume.  I  believe  this  portrait  to  be  a  correct  and 
true  delineation  of  the  horse,  and  there  is  not  a  single  lineament 
in  or  about  it  that  indicates  the  blood  of  either  the  Arabian  or 
the  Barb.  His  pedigree  is  in  his  picture,  and,  from  what  is 


412  THE   HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

known  in  history  and  from  what  has  been  preserved  in  art,  in- 
stead of  "Godolphin  Arabian"  his  true  title  should  be  "Godolphin 
Frenchman."  But  this  subject  has  been  discussed  at  greater 
length  in  the  chapter  on  the  English  Race  Horse,,  to  which  my 
reader  is  here  referred. 

In  the  chapter  on  the  American  Race  Horse,  I  think  sufficient 
attention  has  been  given  to  the  frauds  and  impossibilities  that 
are  to  be  found  everywhere  in  the  extended  pedigrees  of  our  own 
running  horses  to  satisfy  any  one  that  the  remote  extensions  of 
pedigrees  are  a  great  mass  of  dishonest  rubbish,  with  scarcely  a 
speck  of  truth  to  be  found.  I  will,  therefore,  pass  along  to  the 
consideration  of  some  of  the  difficulties,  of  the  same  nature,  that 
have  been  developed  in  investigating  and  recording  the  pedigrees 
of  the  American  Trotting  Horse.  In  entering  the  untrodden 
wilderness  of  trotting-horse  history  it  became  the  ambition  of 
my  life  to  reach  the  truth  in  every  possible  instance  and  to  cut 
off  and  reject  all  frauds  wherever  they  showed  their  heads.  This 
meant  war  from  the  beginning  with  a  great  many  horsemen,  but 
it  also  meant  the  enthusiastic  support  of  a  great  many  honest 
men.  The  trouble,  at  this  point,  was  in  the  fact  that  a  number 
of  prominent,  wealthy  and  influential  breeders  insisted  upon 
their  right  to  state  their  pedigrees  in  their  own  way  and  thus 
compel  me  to  indorse  them  by  inserting  them  in  the  Trotting 
Register.  When  at  work  on  the  early  volumes  of  the  Register, 
especially  the  first,  if  a  man  of  unblemished  reputation  and  intel- 
ligence sent  me  a  list  of  his  stock  to  be  registered,  I  assumed 
that  he  had  too  much  regard  for  his  reputation  and  standing  as 
a  breeder  to  print  a  lot  of  pedigrees  in  his  catalogue  that  he  did 
not  know  to  be  correct,  and  hence  I  accepted  many  a  pedigree 
that  was  based  upon  fiction.  In  course  of  time  it  began  to  dawn 
upon  my  understanding  that  there  were  many  men  in  the  world 
of  unsullied  reputation,  as  they  were  known  in  their  business 
relations,  who  would  stand  up  boldly  for  a  fiction  or  a  fraud  in 
the  pedigrees  of  their  stock.  It  is  but  just  to  say  that  all  the  men 
who  uttered  fraudulent  pedigrees  were  not  equally  guilty,  for  in 
some  cases  the  owners  had  been  victimized  by  unscrupulous 
rogues  from  whom  they  had  purchased,  and  in  others  they  had 
been  betrayed  by  the  still  more  unscrupulous  rogues  whom  they 
had  employed  to  make  up  their  catalogues  on  the  supposition 
that  they  were  capable  and  honest.  This  state  of  things  soon 
developed  another  line  of  thought  and  observation  in  my  mind 


INVESTIGATION    OF    DISPUTED    PEDIGREES.  413 

which  evolved  a  rule  by  which  I  could  determine  the  difference  be  • 
tween  the  degrees  of  honesty  among  horsemen.  One  man,  when 
a  fiction  in  a  pedigree  was  pointed  out,  would  go  to  work  and 
carefully  investigate  it;  while  another  would  hang  and  higgle 
about  it  and  finally  investigate,  not  to  find  the  truth,  but  to  find 
how  many  old  rummies,  swipes  and  negroes  he  could  get  to- 
gether, who  would  support  his  claim  and  swear  to  it  for  a  half- 
dollar  each.  The  first  man  investigates  to  find  the  truth  wher- 
ever it  may  lead;  while  the  second  man  investigates  merely,  not 
to  find  the  truth,  but  to  find  some  kind  of  evidence  to  sustain 
the  untruth.  In  the  everyday  affairs  of  life  these  two  men  may 
stand  on  the  same  plane,  but,  at  heart,  the  one  is  honest  and  the 
other  a  rogue. 

When  Mr.  Charles  Backman  founded  the  great  Stonyford 
breeding  farm  in  Orange  County,  New  York,  he  was  an  excellent 
horseman,  in  a  general  sense,  although  he  did  not  pretend  to 
know  much  about  pedigrees.  About  1869  he  placed  all  his  pedi- 
grees in  my  hands  with  the  request  that  I  would  give  them  a 
careful  examination,  strike  out  everything  that  was  wrong  and 
note  everything  that  was  doubtful  or  uncertain,  that  it  might  be 
investigated  and  the  truth  fully  determined,  no  difference  where 
it  might  lead.  Many  investigations  followed  which  were  con- 
ducted by  his  secretary,  Mr.  Shipman,  either  by  mail  or 
by  personal  visitation — so  many,  indeed,  that  Mr.  Shipman 
became  quite  an  expert  in  this  kind  of  difficult  work.  As 
an  illustration  of  the  methods  pursued,  one  instance  will 
serve  to  show -how  it  was  done,  and  more  than  this,  it  is  a 
very  interesting  history  in  itself.  In  the  first  volume  of  the 
Eegister  I  had  entered  Green  Mountain  Maid,  the  dam  of  the 
famous  Electioneer  and  all  that  family,  as  "by  Harry  Clay,  dam 
said  to  be  by  Lexington."  This  was  the  form  in  which  Mr. 
Backman  had  received  the  pedigree,  except  that  it  was  stated 
positively  and  without  any  "said  to  be"  that  the  dam  was  by 
Lexington,  the  great  running  horse.  After  a  time  I  called  Mr. 
Backman's  attention  to  this  "said  to  be"  and  suggested  that  if 
the  mare  was  really  a  daughter  of  Lexington  she  could  certainly 
be  traced  and  established.  The  next  day,  Mr.  Shipman  started 
to  Western  New  York  and  to  Ohio.  On  his  trip  he  found  the 
mare  had  been  known  in  Western  New  York  as  the  "Angelica 
Mare"  and  afterward  as  "Shanghai  Mary,"  that  she  was  a  trot- 
ter, well  known  locally,  and  that  she  had  trotted  a  race  and  won 


414  THE    HOKSE    OF   AMERICA. 

at  a  State  fair,  in  very  fast  time  for  that  day.  She  had  been 
brought  from  Ohio  by  some  sheep -dealers,  who  were  able  to  give 
her  exact  age,  and  it  was  thus  found  that  she  was  older  than  her 
reputed  sire.  Several  expert  horsemen,  from  a  picture  secured 
by  Mr.  Shipman  on  his  trip,  have  not  hesitated  to  give  it  as  a 
strong  conviction  that  she  belonged  to  the  Cadmus  family,  in 
Southern  Ohio.  In  the  last  two  or  three  years  a  correspondent 
of  the  Chicago  Horse  Review  brings  out  some  local  facts  that 
make  it  almost  morally  certain  that  she  was  bred  by  Goldsmith 
Coffein,  of  Red  Lion,  Ohio,  and  that  she  was  got  by  Iron's  Cad- 
mus, the  sire  of  the  great  Pocahontas.  The  final  nail  has  not 
been  clinched  in  establishing  this  pedigree,  and  probably  never 
will  be,  but  the  circumstances  are  so  f  ally  detailed  as  to  scarcely 
leave  room  for  a  doubt  that  she  was  a  half-sister  to  the  famous 
Pocahontas. 

From  what  has  here  been  said  about  the  methods  of  Mr. 
Backman,  the  leading  breeder  of  that  Deriod,  in  the  North, 
it  should  not  be  inferred  that  all  Northern  breeders  were 
like  him.  The  first  real  battle  I  ever  had  against  fraudulent 
pedigrees  originated  in  Orange  County,  New  York,  with  the 
notorious  Captain  Rynders,  in  which  the  pedigree  of  the  once 
famous  Widow  Machree,  the  dam  of  Aberdeen,  was  involved.  The 
pedigree  of  this  mare  had  been  registered  as  obtained  from  Mr. 
James  W.  Hoyt,  who  once  owned  her,  and  her  dam  was  given  as 
by  Durland's  Messenger  Duroc.  When  Aberdeen  came  before 
the  public  for  patronage,  his  owner,  Rynders,  advertised  him  as 
out  of  Widow  Machree  and  she  out  of  a  mare  by  Abdallah. 
This  was  challenged  as  untrue  by  Mr.  Guy  Miller  and  Mr.  Joseph 
Gavin,  of  Orange  County,  and  I  was  called  upon  to  demand  the 
evidence  upon  which  the  change  had  been  made  from  Messenger 
Duroc  to  Abdallah.  As  a  matter  of  course  "the  fat  was  in  the 
fire"  at  once,  and  out  came  Rynders  with  a  terrific  explosion  of 
anger,  abounding  in  threats  and  denunciations  against  anybody 
and  everybody  who  attempted  to  interfere  with  his  "business." 
The  good  names  of  Guy  Miller  and  Joseph  Gavin  carried  too 
much  weight  as  against  that  of  Isaiah  Rynders,  and,  as  his  last 
card,  he  brought  out  a  duly  and  formally  executed  affidavit, 
sworn  to  by  a  man  whose  name  I  will  not  here  mention,  stating 
that  he  bred  the  Abdallah  mare;  all  of  which  was  the  very  rankest 
perjury,  which  was  so  easily  exposed  that  it  did  Rynders  far 
more  harm  than  good.  At  last  the  whole  truth  came  out  in  a 


INVESTIGATION   OF    DISPUTED    PEDIGREES.  415 

iorm  that  was  complete  and  conclusive,  showing  that  the  mare 
in  question  was  bred  by  Garrett  Duryea,  of  Bethel,  Sullivan 
County,  New  York,  and  was  got  by  a  horse  known  as  Pintler's 
Bolivar.  Rynders  had  been  a  leader  in  New  York  politics  so 
long  that  he  knew  just  how  to  manage  things  where  the  truth 
must  be  suppressed.  He  was  a  liberal  advertiser,  the  two  sport- 
ing papers  were  needy  for  patronage  in  that  line,  and  their 
•columns  were  closed  to  any  and  all  communications  against  his 
side  of  the  question.  But  all  this  failed  to  suppress  the  truth 
and  uphold  a  fraud,  and  I  doubt  whether  there  is  a  man  living 
to-day  who  does  not  believe  that  the  fight  was  fairly  and  honestly 
won.  This  contest  taught  me  a  very  important  lesson,  and  that 
was,  that  if  I  expected  to  fight  bogus  pedigrees  I  must  have  a 
channel  of  communication  of  my  own.  Hence  Wallace's  Monthly, 
which,  in  its  day,  was  not  only  able  to  expose  bogus  pedigrees, 
but  lead  intelligent  thought  and  experience  on  all  breeding  sub- 
jects, till  it  fell  into  the  hands  of  an  unscrupulous  neocracy, 
where  it  soon  died  for  want  of  brains. 

Having  given  a  very  brief  illustration  of  the  methods  which 
governed  Mr.  Backman  in  ascertaining  and  determining  the 
blood  elements  which  entered  into  the  foundation  of  his  great 
breeding  establishment,  and  the  care  and  promptness  with  which 
•errors  were  eliminated,  it  is  now  in  order  to  take  a  glance  at  the 
methods  pursued  at  the  great  Woodburn  Farm,  founded  by  R. 
A.  Alexander  in  Kentucky.  These  were  the  two  earliest  estab- 
lishments, of  any  prominence,  for  breeding  the  trotter,  in  the 
whole  country.  The  one  was  the  northern  center  of  the  interest 
and  the  other  the  southern,  and  they  together  may  be  considered 
as  representative  of  both  sections.  Mr.  Alexander,  I  think,  was 
reared  and  educated  in  Scotland,  and  there  inherited  a  large 
estate.  Upon  coming  into  this  inheritance  he  determined  to 
transfer  his  interests  to  Kentucky,  where  he  bought  up  a  cluster 
of  farms  and  shaped  them  for  the  purpose  of  building  up  a  mam- 
moth establishment  for  the  breeding  of  all  varieties  of  domestic 
animals  of  the  highest  type  and  excellence.  I  think  his  fancy 
ran  more  to  Short  Horn  cattle  than  to  any  other  line  of  breed- 
ing, probably  because  he  knew  more  about  the  value  and  merit  of 
the  different  tribes  of  that  breed  than  he  did  of  any  other  variety. 
The  founding  of  an  establishment  so  immense,  and  for  the  grand 
purpose  of  the  breeding  and  improving  the  varieties  of  domestic 
animals,  was  the  agricultural  sensation  of  the  period,  and  every- 


416  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

body,  from  one  end  of  the  land  to  the  other,  soon  knew  of  and 
applauded  the  great  enterprise.  There  had  been  great  enter- 
prises on  similar  lines  before,  and  there  have  been  even  greater 
ones  since,  but  Mr.  Alexander's  Woodburn  Farm,  of  Kentucky, 
may  always  be  looked  upon  as  the  real  pioneer  in  stock  breeding 
on  a  large  and  methodical  scale,  and  without  limit  as  to  re- 
sources. A  university  education  in  Scotland,  with  all  its  train- 
ing in  the  refinements  of  logical  distinctions,  did  not  bring  to 
Mr.  Alexander  a  knowledge  of  the  pedigrees  of  Kentucky  horses, 
nor  did  it  train  him  in  the  detection  of  the  tricks  of  Kentucky 
horse  dealers,  and  thus  as  a  purchaser  of  his  breeding  stock  he 
was  looked  upon  by  the  "sharps"  as  a  fat  goose,  ready  to  be 
plucked.  After  these  "sharps"  had  secured  their  pluckings, 
Mr.  Alexander  called  in  a  professional  pedigreeist  to  put  the 
lines  of  the  blood  he  had  purchased  in  order  and  print  a  cata- 
logue. This  "professional"  was  not  a  pedigree  tracer,  for  h& 
never  traced  anything  in  his  life,  but  a  pedigree  maker,  and 
wherever  he  thought  that  anything  was  needed  he  added  it, 
whether  true  or  not,  and  it  went  to  the  world  in  that  form.  This. 
is  more  conspicuously  true  in  the  department  of  trotting  pedi- 
grees, as  will  appear  below.  Thus  the  acts  of  an  incapable  and 
dishonest  employee  were  given  the  indorsement  of  an  honorable- 
and  eminent  name;  falsehoods  were  made  to  appear  as  truths; 
counterfeits  were  put  in  circulation  that  are  still  circulating  as- 
genuine  coin,  with  many  people.  Under  the  circumstances,  Mr. 
Alexander  could  hardly  be  blamed,  for,  knowing  nothing  of  such 
matters  of  his  own  knowledge,  he  employed  what  he  supposed 
was  the  best  authority  then  to  be  found.  For  my  own  part, 
when  I  came  to  register  the  Woodburn  stock,  I  was  ready  to 
accept  as  true  whatever  I  found  in  the  catalogue,  believing  that 
Mr.  Alexander  was  incapable  of  publishing  to  the  world  a  misrep- 
resentation. In  this  estimate  of  his  character  I  was  right,  and 
I  have  never  changed  my  opinion  on  that  point,  but  when  I  came 
to  examine  the  structure  of  his  catalogue  I  found  there  was  rot- 
ten wood  all  through  it.  A  few  examples  that  have  been  care- 
fully investigated  will  serve  to  show  the  value  of  the  work  done 
by  the  "pedigree  maker"  for  Mr.  Alexander. 

Pilot  Jr.  was  a  gray  horse,  foaled  1844,  was  got  by  Old  Pacing 
Pilot  and  attained  the  distinction  of  being  the  head  of  a  well- 
known  family  of  trotters.  He  was  foaled  1844,  bred  by  Angereau 
Gray,  and  owned  a  number  of  years  by  Glasgow  &  Heinsohn,  of 


INVESTIGATION   OF   DISPUTED   PEDIGREES.  417 

Louisville,  Kentucky.  He  was  kept  a  number  of  years  about 
Lexington,  Kentucky,  by  Dr.  Herr,  Mr.  Bradley,  and  perhaps 
others,  and  always  advertised  as  "by  Pilot  (the  pacer),  dam 
Nancy  Pope,  grandam  Nancy  Taylor."  Nobody  then  ever  pre- 
tended to  know  what  horse  was  the  sire  of  either  Nancy  Pope  or 
Nancy  Taylor.  He  was  then  owned  by  the  parties  who  afterward 
sold  him  to  Mr.  Alexander,  and  it  is  evident  they  did  not  then 
know  anything  about  the  sires  of  these  mares.  Mr.  Alexander 
bought  him  in  1858,  and  immediately  his  "pedigree  maker'7 
furnished  the  sires  of  these  two  mares;  Nancy  Pope  was  given  as 
by  Havoc,  son  of  Sir  Charles,  and  Nancy  Taylor  as  by  imported 
Alfred.  The  controversy  about  this  pedigree  was  long  and 
sharp,  the  one  side,  headed  by  the  modern  management  at  Wood- 
burn,  as  usual  laboring  to  sustain  the  infallibility  of  the  Wood- 
burn  catalogues,  and  the  other  to  reach  the  exact  truth,  what- 
ever it  might  be.  The  Board  of  Censors  of  the  National  Breeders7 
Association  sent  out  a  call  for  information  on  certain  abstract 
points  and  finally  reached  a  decision  as  follows:  (1)  That  Havoc, 
the  reputed  sire  of  Nancy  Pope,  the  dam  of  Pilot  Jr.,  died  in 
1828.  (2)  That  Nancy  Pope  was  not  foaled  till  1832.  (3)  That 
the  breeding  of  Nancy  Taylor,  the  dam  of  Nancy  Pope,  was  un- 
known. These  dates  were  fixed  by  undoubted  evidence,  and,  as 
afterward  developed,  another  might  have  been  added  with  equal 
authenticity.  Imported  Alfred,  the  reputed  sire  of  Nancy  Tay- 
lor, was  not  imported  till  several  years  after  Nancy  Taylor  was 
foaled,  and  thus  it  was  clearly  shown  by  the  absolutely  insupera- 
ble difficulties  of  dates  that  both  the  sires  inserted  in  the  pedi- 
gree were  nothing  more  than  very  stupid  fictions. 

Edwin  Forrest  seems  to  have  held  second  place  in  the  list  of 
stallions  in  the  Woodburn  Stud  at  that  period,  and  the  remote 
extensions  of  his  pedigree  were  also  fictitious.  His  grandam 
was  represented  to  be  by  Duroc,  the  famous  son  of  imported 
Diomed,  and  his  great-grandam  by  imported  Messenger.  The 
first  two  crosses  were  technically  inacurately  stated,  but  the 
second  two,  as  given  here,  were  purely  fictitious. 

Norman,  the  third  stallion  in  the  catalogue,  had  his  sire  cor- 
rectly given  as  the  Morse  Horse,  but  his  dam  was  given  as  by 
Jersey  Highlander  and  his  grandam  as  by  Bishop7s  Hamble- 
tonian,  son  of  Messenger,  both  of  which  were  wholly  fictitious. 
His  dam  was  by  a  horse  called  Magnum  Bonum,  a  representative 
of  a  family  of  that  name,  and  that  is  all  that  is  known  of  his 


418  THE   HOBSE   OF   AMERICA. 

pedigree.     A  full  showing  of  this  pedigree  will  be  found  in  the 
"Trotting  Register,"  Vol.  III. 

Bay  Chief  was  a  bay  son  of  Mambrino  Chief,  with  a  bald  face, 
and  was  often  called  Bald  Chief.  He  was  the  sensational  trotter 
of  the  whole  Mambrino  Chief  family,  and  I  believe  it  is  true  that 
when  four  years  old  he  showed  a  half-mile  on  Mr.  Alexander's 
track  in  1:08  and  repeated  in  1:08^.  In  the  catalogue  he  is 
given  as  foaled  in  1859,  got  by  Mambrino  Chief,  dam  by  Keokuk, 
son  of  imported  Truffle;  grandam  a  thoroughbred  mare  by  Stam- 
boul  Arabian.  As  this  was  found  in  Mr.  Alexander's  catalogue 
I  took  it  for  granted  it  must  be  true,  but  I  never  had  heard  of  a 
running  horse  called  Keokuk  before,  and  I  kept  hunting  for  ever 
so  many  years  without  finding  hide  nor  hair  of  him,  until  1885, 
when  the  whole  mystery  was  developed.  Mr.  Richard  Johnson, 
of  Scott  County,  Kentucky,  had  business  interests  in  Keokuk, 
Iowa,  in  the  early  fifties,  probably  locating  land  warrants,  and  he 
bought  a  pair  of  mares  in  Keokuk  to  travel  over  the  prairies,  and 
when  he  was  through  with  his  work  ha  brought  the  team  home 
with  him  to  Scott  County.  He  knew  nothing  whatever  of  the 
breeding  of  those  mares,  but  they  were  a  good  pair  of  drivers 
and  one  of  them  was  quite  a  smart  roadster  that  he  called  "Old 
Keokuk."  He  bred  this  mare,  Keokuk,  in  1858  to  Mambrino 
Chief,  and  in  1859  she  produced  the  colt  called  Bay  Chief.  In 
1862  he  was  bred  to  some  sixteen  or  eighteen  mares,  and  the  fall 
of  that  year  Mr.  Alexander  bought  the  colt  at  public  auction, 
paying  one  thousand  dollars  for  him.  He  was  taken  to  Wood- 
burn,  put  in  training  and  never  covered  any  more  mares.  In  the 
spring  of  1865  he  was  killed  in  a  raid  of  Southern  troops  upon 
the  horse  stock  at  Woodburn,  (For  further  particulars  of  this 
little  sketch  the  reader  is  referred  to  Wallace's  Monthly  for  1885, 
page  285.)  To  fix  up  a  pedigree  for  the  maternal  side  of  this 
colt  was  no  easy  matter,  but  Mr.  Alexander's  "pedigree  maker" 
proved  himself  fully  equal  to  the  occasion.  There  was  the  nasty 
name  Keokuk  fastened  to  the  old  mare,  and  it  would  stick  as 
tight  as  wax  to  the  end  of  her  days,  coming  from  a  region  where 
there  was  no  drop  of  running  blood;  so  he  made  a  "thorough- 
bred" horse,  right  on  the  spot,  and  gave  him  the  name  of  Keokuk, 
which  would  account  for  the  name  of  the  mare,  and  pronounced 
him  a  son  of  imported  Truffle.  To  supply  a  "thoroughbred" 
grandam  was  comparatively  easy,  for  Mr.  Johnson  had  long  been 
a  resident  of  Scott  County,  and  the  horse  Stamboul  had  been  kept 


INVESTIGATION   OF   DISPUTED   PEDIGREES.  419 

in  that  county,  hence  there  could  be  no  doubt  that  she  was  a 
"thoroughbred"  daughter  of  that  horse.  With  this  review  of 
the  misfortunes  of  Mr.  Alexander  in  placing  the  arrangement 
and,  I  might  say,  care  of  his  pedigrees,  in  dishonest  hands,  we 
will  pass  whatever  may  remain  of  his  early  stallions,  and  take  a 
glance  at  some  of  the  pedigrees  of  his  brood  mares. 

Black  Rose  proved  to  be  one  of  the  best  brood  mares  ever 
owned  at  Woodburn.  I  am  told  she  was  a  pacer,  and  certainly 
all  that  is  known  of  her  blood  was  pacing  blood.  She  was  sought 
after  and  procured  by  Mr.  Alexander  because  she  had  produced 
several  trotters,  and  it  can  be  read  all  through  his  purchases  for 
the  trotting  stud,  that  he  had  undoubting  confidence  in  the 
theory  that  trotters  must  come  from  trotters.  When  this  mare 
first  appeared  in  the  Woodburn  catalogue  no  dam  was  given  to 
her,  but  meantime  the  "pedigree  maker"  had  come  around,  and 
the  next  year  she  was  fitted  out  with  the  following,  in  fine  style. 

"  Black  Rose,'bl.  m.,  foaled  about  1847  ;  got  by  Tom  Teemer  ;  dam  by  Can- 
non's Whip  ;  g.  d.  by  Robin  Gray,  son  of  imp.  Royalist." 

The  pedigree  stood  in  this  form  a  number  of  years,  and  proba- 
bly would  still  be  so  standing  had  it  not  been  that  in  trying  to 
learn  something  more  about  the  sire,  Tom  Teemer,  I  received 
some  intimations  that  made  me  doubtful  about  the  maternal  side. 
On  a  certain  occasion  I  asked  Mr.  R.  S.  Veech,  of  Kentucky,  what 
he  knew  about  it,  and  he  replied  that  he  had  made  a  trip  to 
Clark  County  for  no  other  purpose  than  to  trace  and  investigate 
the  pedigree  of  Black  Rose,  and  he  was  not  able  to  get  a  single 
syllable  of  information  about  her  dam,  any  more  than  if  she  never 
had  a  dam.  Some  time  afterward  I  wrote  to  Mr.  Brodhead, 
manager  at  Woodburn,  inquiring  where  the  pedigree  of  Black 
Rose  as  given  and  perpetuated  in  the  Woodburn  catalogues  came 
from  and  on  what  basis  it  rested.  He  replied  promptly  and 
briefly  that  Mr.  Veech  had  made  a  trip  to  Clark  County  in  search 
of  this  pedigree  and  the  result  of  that  search  was  what  appeared 
in  the  catalogue.  These  are  the  facts,  substantially,  as  given 
me  by  these  two  gentlemen,  and  this  is  the  first  time  I  have  ever 
given  them  to  the  public.  I  have  known  Mr.  Veech  intimately 
and  trustingly  for  twenty-eight  years  and  I  know  him  to  be  em- 
inently truthful.  I  have  not  known  Mr.  Brodhead  so  long,  and  if 
he  had  not  published  the  fraudulent  extension  of  this  pedigree 
in  his  catalogues  every  year  for  more  than  ten  years,  before  Mr. 


420  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

Veech  made  his  trip  to  Clark  County,  I  might  at  least  express 
my  sympathy  with  him  in  having  so  bad  a  memory.  Mr.  Brod- 
head  had  nothing  to  do  with  either  the  original  construction  or 
utterance  of  this  fraud,  for  he  was  not  then  connected  with  the 
management  of  Woodburn.  My  readers  can  employ  their  own 
terms  in  characterizing,  as  it  deserves,  the  fraudulent  act  of 
manufacturing  a  pedigree  out  of  whole  cloth;  and  they  can  also 
exercise  their  own  ethical  discrimination  in  determining  whether 
the  man  who  executes  the  fraud  is  any  worse  than  the  man  who 
maintains  and  supports  it  after  he  knows  it  is  fraudulent. 

We  pass  on  to  Sally  Russell,  the  grandam  of  Maud  S.  It  is 
not  a  pleasant  task  to  review  an  old  controversy,  whatever  it 
might  bring  to  light;  but  a  controversy  which  involves  the  true 
lines  of  descent  of  so  great  a  family  as  that  of  Maud  S.,  Nutwood, 
Lord  Russell,  etc.,  is  worth  preserving  for  the  enlightenment  of 
future  generations.  It  all  turns  upon  the  breeding  of  Sally 
Russell  and  the  identity  of  her  .breeder.  She  was  a  little  chest- 
nut mare,  represented  to  have  been  foaled  1850,  got  by  Boston 
and  out  of  Maria  Russell,  by  Rattler,  and  so  on,  claimed  to  be 
thoroughbred.  She  was  bought  by  Mr.  Alexander  from  the  fore- 
man on  Captain  John  W.  Russell's  farm,  with' the  pedigree  given 
as  above.  The  name  of  her  breeder  was  not  given  to  Mr.  Alex- 
ander, I  think,  but  Bruce  has  it  that  her  dam,  Maria  Russell,  and 
this  mare  Sally  Russell  were  both  bred  by  Benjamin  Luckett.  In 
1863  this  mare  was  offered,  with  others,  to  the  highest  bidder,  at 
Mr.  Alexander's  annual  sale,  being  then  thirteen  years,  old  ac- 
cording to  the  records  of  the  establishment,  and  the  auctioneer 
was  not  able  to  coax  a  bid  of  ten  dollars  on  her  and  she  was  led 
out  unsold.  Five  years  later — 1868 — I  attended  the  Woodburn 
sale,  and  a  little  scrubby-looking  old  mare  was  brought  into  the 
ring,  represented  to  have  been  stinted  to  imported  Australian, 
and  when  this  was  announced  a  subdued  whisper  went  round 
the  ring,  "She'll  never  raise  another  foal."  The  auctioneer  was 
eloquent  upon  the  value  of  the  Australian  blood  on  the  Boston 
blood,  and  the  possibilities  of  the  coming  foal,  but  all  to  no  pur- 
pose, as  the  mare  was  led  out  of  the  ring  the  second  time,  with 
no  person  willing  to  bid  a  dollar.  I  was  astonished  that  such  an 
animal  should  have  been  put  up  at  auction,  for  she  had  all  the 
appearance  of  being  twenty-eight  instead  of  eighteen.  She  died 
that  summer,  apparently  of  old  age,  and  I  have  no  shadow  of 
doubt  that  she  sank  under  the  weight  of  years.  On  two  separate 


INVESTIGATION    OF    DISPUTED    PEDIGREES.  4">1 

occasions  great  crowds  of  practical  horsemen  had,  in  this  man- 
ner, proclaimed  that  Mr.  Alexander  had  been  victimized  in  the 
age  of  the  mare,  and  fifteen  years  later  I  determined  to  settle  the 
question  as  to  whether  this  judgment  was  right. 

As  the  supposed  age  and  breeding  of  Sally  Russell  has  been 
made  to  turn  and  rest  upon  the  ownership  of  her  dam,  Maria 
Russell,  it  is  important  that  we  should  have  the  antecedent  cir- 
cumstances set  out  in  the  plainest  possible  manner.  Captain 
John  A.  Holton  and  Captain  John  W.  Russell  were  farmers  in 
Kentucky,  living  a  few  miles  apart,  and  I  think  they  were  both 
river  men  at  one  time  or  another;  certainly  Russell  was  in  com- 
mand of  a  snag  boat  on  the  Ohio  and  Mississippi  along  about 
1836— iO.  Like  many  other  Kentucky  farmers,  they  both  bred  a 
few  running  horses,  but  not  enough,  singly,  to  justify  the  ex- 
pense of  separate  training  establishments,  so  they  united  their 
strings  in  one  stable,  sharing  the  expense  and  dividing  the 
profits,  if  any,  equally.  The  partnership  did  not  extend  to  the 
joint  ownership  of  any  of  the  horses,  but  simply  to  the  losses  or 
profits  of  training  and  racing,  and  Major  Benjamin  Luckett  was 
in  their  employ  as  trainer. 

Before  going  to  work  in  earnest  on  this  investigation,  I  learned 
that  Mr.  Llewelyn  Holton,  a  son  of  Captain  John  A.  Holton, 
still  resided  on  the  old  farm  and  that  he  was  old  enough  to  know 
all  about  the  origin  and  history  of  Maria  Russell,  as  well  as  the 
other  stock  belonging  to  his  father  at  that  time.  This  was  very 
encouraging,  but  I  wanted  to  know  whether  he  was  a  man  who 
could  be  relied  upon  to  tell  the  truth.  On  this  point  I  addressed 
an  inquiry  to  the  late  Colonel  R.  P.  Pepper,  and  his  reply  is  as 
follows:  "Your  letter  of  the  29th  received.  I  regard  L.  Holton, 
of  this  county,  as  a  man  of  honor,  integrity  and  intelligence,  and 
the  peer  of  any  gentleman  of  my  acquaintance.  In  my  opinion 
any  statement  he  will  make  upon  any  subject,  as  to  his  own 
knowledge,  will  be  accepted  in  this  community  as  readily  as  that 
of  any  gentleman  in  it.  He  is  a  man  who  sometimes  gets  on 
sprees  from  intoxicating  liquors,  but  I  have  never  heard  of  it 
affecting  his  intelligence,  honor  or  integrity,  and,  as  above 
stated,  his  word  will  be  accepted  in  this  community  at  this  time 
as  soon  as  the  word  of  any  gentleman  in  this  county  or  commu- 
nity." 

With  this  very  high  indorsement  I  did  not  hesitate  to  send  a 
commissioner  to  interview  Mr.  Holton  and  get  from  him  the 


422  THE   HOUSE   OF   AMERICA. 

exact  facts  in  the  case,  without  any  leading  questions  and  with- 
out any  shading  of  the  truth  or  bias  on  either  side.  What  this 
commissioner  learned  will  be  given  further  on. 

Let  us  now  turn  to  the  other  side  and  see  how  Mr.  Brodhead 
manages  to  get  Maria  Russell  into  the  ownership  of  Captain 
John  W.  Russell.  Under  date  of  April  30,  1883,  he  wrote  to  the 
Turf,  Field  and  Farm  as  follows: 

"A  Colonel  Shepherd,  of  the  South — New  Orleans,  I  think — gave  or  sold  to 
Captain  J.  W.  Russell  and  Captain  J.  A.  Holton  a  Stockholder  mare,  out  of 
Miranda,  by  Topgallant,  etc.  Thismare  was  called  Miss  Shepherd.  Theyowned 
and  bred  this  mare  in  partnership.  Among  the  produce  thus  owned  were 
Maria  Russell  by  Rattler,  Mary  Bell  by  Sea  Gull,  and  Swiss  Boy  by  imported 
Swiss.  Captain  Russell  sold  his  half  of  Swiss  Boy  to  Mr.  Taylor,  son-in-law  of 
Ben  Luckett,  for  $750.  Maria  Russell  was  owned  and  run  as  a  partnership 
mare  by  Holton  and  Russell,  but  was  trained  by  Major  Ben  Luckett." 

Then  follows  a  lot  of  stuff,  without  any  relevancy  whatever, 
going  to  show  that  Ben  Luckett  trained  her  at  three  years  old, 
but  had  no  connection  whatever  with  the  family,  all  of  which  is 
known  to  everybody,  and  then  he  again  asserts  that  "in  the  divi- 
sion of  the  partnership  property,  Maria  Russell  fell  to  Captain 
Russell."  The  next  dash  that  Mr.  Brodhead  makes  is  fora  negro 
seventy-five  years  old,  who  had  been  in  the  Russell  family  from 
his  birth,  named  Jesse  Dillon.  Jesse  was  no  exception  to  his 
race,  or  indeed  to  many  of  the  white  race,  for  whenever  any  in- 
formation is  wanted  from  them  they  are  always  ready  to  give  it, 
as  they  expect  at  least  one  half-dollar,  and  if  they  tell  the  story 
"right  up  to  what  is  wanted"  they  expect  two.  Jesse  was  sharp 
enough  to  discover  just  what  his  interviewers  were  after,  and  he 
was  ready  to  supply  "the  long-felt  want."  Jesse  was  able  to  tell 
just  how  the  mare  got  her  eye  knocked  out  and  just  how  he  took 
her  to  Blackburn's  and  had  her  brsd  to  Boston.  In  all  this,  in- 
cluding the  loss  of  the  eye  and  the  trip  to  Blackburn's,  Jesse 
may  have  had  in  his  mind  Captain  Russell's  one-eyed  mare,  Mary 
Churchill,  while  his  interviewers  were  thinking  about  Maria. 
Russell.  It  is  no  uncommon  thing  for  white  people  as  well  as 
black,  at  seventy-five,  to  get  names  of  forty  or  fifty  years  past 
confused. 

This  is  all  of  Mr.  Brodhead's  case  so  far  as  what  he  presents 
has  any  relevancy  to  the  point  at  issue,  namely,  the  identity  and 
ownership  of  the  mare  Maria  Russell.  The  pedigree  was  not 
made  at  Woodburn;  Mr.  Alexander  in  this  case  as  in  many  others. 


INVESTIGATION"   OF   DISPUTED    PEDIGREES.  423 

was  simply  the  victim  of  the  sharper.  The  only  shadow  of  evi- 
dence that  has  been  presented  that  the  pedigree  might  be  true  is 
the  evidence  of  a  superannuated  negro,  Jesse  Dillon.  For  the 
AVoodburn  side  of  the  case  the  reader  is  referred  to  Wallace's 
Monthly  for  June,  1883,  page  366.  In  replying  to  this  case  I  will 
try  to  summarize  the  different  considerations  as  briefly  as  possi- 
ble. 

First.  The  case  is  opened  with  the  assumption  that  Colonel 
Shepherd  presented  the  mare  Miss  Shepherd,  by  Stockholder,  to 
Captain  J.  W.  Russell  and  Captain  J.  A.  Holton.  We  might 
laugh  at  this  by  asking  which  half  he  gave  to  Russell  and  which 
half  to  Holton?  This  is  merely  constructing  a  theory  by  which 
the  ownership  of  Russell  might  be  maintained.  It  is  safe  to  say 
the  mare  was  given  to  Holton  and  to  Holton  alone,  and  here  is 
the  proof  of  it.  There  is  a  silver  cup,  now  in  possession  of  Mr. 
Bowen,  grandson  of  J.  A.  Holton,  with  this  inscription:  "J.  A. 
Holton,  awarded  by  Franklyn  Agricultural  Society,  1836,  for 
filly  Maria  Russell."  Where  is  Captain  J.  \V.  Russell's  owner- 
ship at  that  date? 

Second.  When  S.  D.  Bruce  was  compiling  his  Stud  Book,  Cap- 
tain John  AV.  Russell  had  his  thoroughbred  stock  entered  there. 
There  were  several  brood  mares  with  their  produce  under  them, 
but  where  were  Maria  Russell  and  her  daughter  Sally  Russell? 
They  appear  as  the  property  of  Ben  Luckett,  when  everybody 
knows  he  had  nothing  to  do  with  them.  As  Captain  Russell  did 
not  have  them  entered  when  he  was  entering  his  other  stock,  I 
must  take  it  as  prima  facie  evidence  that  he  did  not  own  them 
at  that  time. 

Third.  It  is  now  in  imperishable  evidence  that  John  W.  Rus- 
sell did  not  own  Maria  Russell  in  1836,  and  that  he  did  not  own 
her  at  the  time  Bruce  was  compiling  his  Stud  Book,  and  now 
the  question  is,  was  there  ever  a  time  when  he  did  own  her?  To 
answer  this  question  we  must  turn  to  Llewellyn  Holton,  the  only 
man  then  living  who  knew  and  had  a  right  to  know  all  about 
the  history  of  this  mare.  His  statement  is  as  follows: 

"FORKS  OF  ELKHOKN.  May  24,  1883. 

"  This  is  to  certify  that  my  father,  Captain  John  A.  Holton,  was,  for  a  number 
of  years,  interested  with  Captain  John  W.  Russell  in  a  number  of  thorough- 
breds, and  they  raced  them  in  partnership.  When  they  dissolved  and  divided 
the  stock,  I  am  positively  certain  that  my  father  retained  all  the  descendants 
of  the  Stockholder  mare — among  them  Maria  Russell,  and  all  her  produce — 


424  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

and  I  know  to  my  certain  knowledge  that  Captain  Russell  never  owned  or  had 
in  bis  possession  the  mare  Maria  Russell,  or  any  of  her  produce  ;  and  I  further 
know  to  my  certain  knowledge  that  said  mare,  Maria  Russell,  had  two  good 
eyes  from  the  time  of  her  foaling  until  the  day  of  her  death.  If  my  father 
hred  a  mare  to  Boston  in  1848,  I  incline  to  the  opinion  that  it  was  a  bay  mare 
called  Limber,  for  the  reason  that  she,  Limber,  was  very  uncertain,  having 
missed  several  seasons.  There  is  one  point,  however,  that  I  feel  very  certain 
upon,  and  that  is  that  neither  my  father  nor  Captain  Russell,  during  their  rac- 
ing or  breeding  career,  ever  owned  a  Boston  filly.  As  Boston  was  the  most 
famous  horse  of  his  time,  it  is  not  at  all  possible  that  there  could  have  been  a 
Boston  colt  or  filly  on  my  father's  farm  and  I  not  knowing  of  the  fact.  I  was 
born  in  the  old  homestead  the  15th  of  November,  1820,  and  have  resided  either 
there  or  adjoining  all  my  life;  therefore  I  had  constant  opportunity  to  know 
all  about  my  father's  stock  of  horses.  L.  HOLTON. 

"  I  hereby  attest  that  the  above  is  my  father's  signature. — J.  A.  HOLTON,  son 
of  Llewellyn  Holton." 

Fourth.  With  the  foregoing  clear  and  decisive  statement  before 
us,  it  is  not  necessary  to  determine  whether  the  partnership  be- 
tween Holton  and  Russell  embraced  the  joint  ownership  of  the 
racing  stock  or  whether  the  running  colts  of  the  two  farms  were 
brought  together  from  year  to  year,  and  as  a  matter  of  economy 
and  profit,  trained  and  raced  as  one  stable.  This  latter  view  of 
the  question  seems  to  be  made  plain.  In  his  interview  with  Mr. 
Holton  my  commissioner  reported  as  follows:  "The  horses  were 
always  trained  by  Captain  Holton  at  his  private  track  at  the 
Forks  of  Elkhorn.  That  he,  Llewellyn  Holton,  always  went 
after  the  colts  that  were  on  the  Russell  farm  when  the  training 
season  commenced,  and  at  the  close  of  the  racing  campaign  of 
the  year  he  always  took  those  back  that  came  from  the  Russell 
stock,  while  those  from  Captain  Holton's  stock  were  kept  on  the 
home  farm.  When  the  partnership  between  Captain  Holton 
and  Captain  Russell  was  dissolved,  Mr.  Llewellyn  Holton  is  posi- 
tively certain  that  Captain  Russell  retained  his  own  stock  and 
Captain  Holton  his  own,  the  latter  consisting  of  the  produce  of 
the  Stockholder  mare,  among  them  Maria  Russell,  and  all  her 
produce.  And  he  is  still  more  positively  certain  that  neither  the 
mare,  Maria  Russell,  nor  any  of  her  produce  was  ever  in  the 
hands  of  Captain  Russell."  At  the  close  of  each  season  the 
owners,  respectively,  took  their  own  stock  home  till  the  next 
spring,  and  after  a  series  of  years  each  owner  took  his  own  stock 
home,  and  that  was  the  end  of  the  arrangement. 

Fifth.  In  the  summer  of  1883  I  met  Mr.  John  W.  Russell, 
son  of  Captain  Russell,  at  the  house  of  Mr.  R.  S.  Veech,  near 


INVESTIGATION   OF   DISPUTED   PEDIGREES.  425 

Louisville,  Kentucky,  and  we  had  some  conversation  on  the 
question  of  the  pedigree  of  Sally  Russell,  which  had  then  been  in 
hot  controversy  for  some  months.  The  subject  was  not  a  pleas- 
ant one  to  him  and  he  either  parried  or  negatived  the  few  ques- 
tions I  asked.  A  year  or  two  after  this  I  met  him  at  the  Gait 
House  in  Louisville,  and  we  had  a  very  pleasant  conversation. 
The  controversy  about  Sally  Russell  had  then  subsided,  and  I 
asked  him  if  he  remembered  his  father's  thoroughbred  mare 
Mary  Churchill.  "Oh,  yes,"  he  said,  "she  was  the  first  horse  I 
ever  rode,  and  my  folks  were  very  much  afraid  I  would  fall  off 
and  get  hurt."  I  then  asked  him  if  Mary  Churchill  was  blind  of 
one  eye,  and  he  answered  he  "'could  not  remember."  My  next 
question  was,  whether  he  recollected  anything  about  Maria.  Rus- 
sell, and  his  reply  was:  "Nothing  that  is  definite."  Then  fol- 
lowed the  inquiry,  "whether  there  were  any  traditions  in  the 
household  going  to  show  that  his  father  ever  owned  Maria  Rus- 
sell," and  he  replied:  "There  are  no  traditions  that  are  reliable." 
These  replies  were  a  most  grateful  surprise  to  me,  and  if  I  have 
not  given  the  precise  words  used  I  certainly  have  given  the  pre- 
cise meaning. 

Sixth.  Llewellyn  Holton  was  sixty-three  years  old  in  1883  and 
he  was  afflicted  with  physical  paralysis,  but  his  mind  seems  to 
have  been  perfectly  sound  and  memory  good  for  a  man  of  his  age. 
Before  he  had  the  slightest  intimation  that  a  pedigree  was  being 
investigated  that  might  call  him  into  controversy,  he  was  asked 
about  Maria  Russell  by  one  of  the  most  prominent  and  distin- 
guished of  all  the  breeders  of  Kentucky,  and  that  breeder  wrote 
me  as  follows: 

"I  have  seen  Mr.  L.  Holton,  the  son  of  Captain  Jolm  A.  Holton,  of  this 
county,  and  be  says  his  father  bred  and  owned  Maria  Russell;  tbat  sbe  was 
by  Rattler,  and  out  of  a  mare  by  Stockholder,  and  was  foaled  1834.  He  says 
he  thinks  a  man  by  the  name  of  William  Duvall  can  give  some  information 
about  these  mares.  I  will  see  him  to-morrow,  and  write  you." 

As  this  information  about  Maria  Russell  was  elicited  from  Mr. 
Holton  on  the  spur  of  the  moment,  and  as  he  gave  her  pedigree 
correctly,  and  not  only  this,  but  gave  the  year  in  which  she  was 
foaled  correctly,  his  memory,  at  least  so  far  as  this  mare  is  con- 
cerned seems  to  ha\3  been  remarkably  good. 

Seventh.  My  correspondent  wrote  a  few  days  later:  "I  have 
just  learned  from  William  Duvall,  who  trained  for  Captain  J.  A. 


426  THE   HOUSE    OF   AMERICA. 

Holton  in  1842,  that  he  remembers  the  mare  Maria  Russell,  and 
he  thinks  she  was  by  Seagull,  and  out  of  Limber,  by  Whipster; 
he  also  remembers  a  mare  owned  by  Holton  that  was  by  Rattler, 
but  cannot  remember  any  more  about  her."  This  confirms  Mr. 
Holton's  recollections  in  a  very  striking  and  satisfactory  manner. 
As  a  trainer  Mr.  Duvall  did  not  handle  the  brood  mares,  but 
only  their  produce.  He  recalled  a  Seagull  mare  and  a  Rattler 
mare,  that  Captain  Holton  owned,  but  he  attached  the  name 
"Maria  Russell"  to  the  wrong  one.  This  kind  of  impromptu 
inaccuracy  is  almost  always  an  element  of  strength,  for  it  goes  to 
prove  that  the  witness  has  not  been  "coached."  He  remembered 
there  was  a  mare  by  Rattler  in  the  field,  and  as  there  was  no 
other  Rattler  mare  owned  by  either  Holton  or  Russell,  the  iden- 
tity of  Maria  Russell  is  clearly  established  as  the  property  of 
Captain  Holton  in  1842. 

Eighth.  With  the  high  indorsement  of  Mr.  Llewellyn  Holton 
as  a  man  of  truth  and  honor,  given  on  page  421  of  this  chapter; 
and  with  the  evidence  before  me  of  his  clear  and  unclouded 
memory  in  giving  correctly  not  only  the  pedigrees  but  the  year 
in  which  Maria  Russell  was  foaled,  and  all  this  before  there  was 
any  pressure  or  suspicion  on  his  part  as  to  where  his  disclosure 
might  lead,  I  cannot,  as  an  honest  man,  fail  to  believe  that  he 
told  the  truth.  Thus,  after  leaving  out  all  the  minor  evidences, 
we  have  the  three  major  points  fully  and  clearly  established, 
namely,  (1)  the  inscription  on  the  silver  cup  that  Captain  Hol- 
ton owned  her  in  1836;  (2)  the  evidence  of  William  Duvall  that 
he  owned  her  in  1842;  and  (3)  the  statement  of  Llewellyn  Holton 
that  he  owned  her  always  and  that  she  died  his. 

Ninth.  At  the  Woodburn  sale  of  1863  and  1868  there  were  cer- 
tainly at  least  two  hundred  experienced  horsemen  and  breeders 
present  who  were  able  to  discriminate  concerning  a  mare  repre- 
sented to  be  thirteen  years  old  when  she  looked  ten  years  more; 
or  concerning  a  mare  represented  to  be  eighteen  years  old  when 
she  looked  as  if  she  were  twenty-eight.  Hence,  no  man  was 
willing  to  bid  five  dollars  on  her.  This  I  take  it,  was  the  per- 
sonal judgment  of  every  man  who  thought  anything  about  it, 
and  when  she  died  a  few  weeks  after  the  last  sale,  nobody  could 
doubt  that  she  died  of  old  age,  and  nobody  could  doubt  that  Mr. 
Alexander  represented  her  to  the  public  just  as  she  had  been 
represented  to  him,  both  in  age  and  breeding,  by  the  rogue  who 
victimized  him. 


INVESTIGATION    OF    DISPUTED    PEDIGREES.  427 

The  mare  Sally  Russell,  the  grandam  of  Maud  S.,  had  been 
sold  to  Mr.  Alexander  by  the  foreman  of  Captain  Russell's  farm, 
and  it  does  not  appear  that  he  represented  her  as  having  been 
bred  by  Captain  Russell.  Indeed,  it  was  not  claimed  at  Wood- 
burn  that  Captain  Russell  bred  her  until  a  representative  of  that 
establishment  called  at  my  office  to  examine  the  service  books  of 
Boston  and  there  found  that  "John  Russell's  one-eyed  mare" 
had  been  bred  in  1849.  If  a  fraud,  therefore,  was  established 
the  Russell  family  must  bear  the  odium.  Hence  all  evidence 
from  that  source  must  be  considered  in  the  light  of  the  fact  that 
every  member  of  the  family  is  deeply  interested.  But  notwith- 
standing the  efforts  of  the  Russell  family  to  preserve  the  father's 
name  from  obloquy,  and  notwithstanding  the  trip  in  search  of 
some  superannuated  darkey  who  could  remember  anything  and 
everything  in  consideration  of  the  pour-boire  that  would  be  forth- 
coming, there  stood  that  terrible  statement  of  Llewellyn  Holton 
that  could  not  be  met  by  evidence.  The  whole  matter  was 
against  him,  and  Mr.  Brodhead  was  not  happy.  He  knew  he 
could  not  prove  him  wrong,  and  the  only  course  left  open  was 
to  get  him  to  take  back  certain  things  that  he  had  said  on  the 
ground  that  his  memory  had  failed  and  that  the  fight  was  be- 
tween "Old  Kaintuck"  and  outside  parties  who  had  no  business 
to  interfere  with  Kentucky  affairs.  On  an  appointed  day,  there- 
fore, all  who  were  supposed  to  have  any  influence  with  Mr.  Hol- 
ton, in  the  whole  countryside,  met  Mr.  Brodhead,  and  they  came 
down  on  "the  poor  old  paralytic"  hammer  and  tongs.  They 
asked  him  what  he  remembered  about  all  the  horses,  each  in  his 
turn,  in  the  whole  neighborhood,  whether  he  had  ever  heard  of 
them  before  or  not.  This  was  kept  up  a  long  time,  but  they 
could  not  prevail  on  him  to  take  back  a  single  specific  statement 
he  had  made.  He  had  said  Captain  Russell  had  never  owned 
Maria  Russell  or  any  of  her  produce,  and  he  would  not  take  it 
back.  He  had  said  Maria  Russell  had  two  good  eyes  when  she  died, 
and  he  would  not  take  it  back.  At  last  when  the  poor  old  in- 
valid was  worn  out  they  sprung  the  patriotic  dodge  of  "Kentucky 
against  the  world"  upon  him  and  this  had  some  effect,  but  not 
enough  to  save  the  anxious  "bulldozers"  from  a  feeling  of  great 
depression.  At  last  Mr.  Brodhead  seized  a  pen  and  indited  a 
letter  for  him  to  sign,  addressed  to  me,  with  the  request  that  I 
would  publish  it.  I  am  not  able  to  say  how  many  attempts  were 
made  to  get  such  a  letter  as  he  would  be  willing  to  sign,  but 


428  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

several  different  drafts  were  made,  and  sick  and  worried,  and  in 
order  to  get  rid  of  his  tormentors,  he  signed,  and  the  letter  came 
to  me,  and  I  published  it  as  follows: 

"FORKS  OF  ELKHORN,  June  12,  1883. 
"MR.  J.  H.  WALLACE. 

"  DEAR  SIR  :  In  answer  to  your  letter  to  my  son,  of  May  21,  1883,  there  are 
three  points  suggested.  First,  in  regard  to  her  produce  (Maria  Russell's).  I 
have  no  recollection  any  further.  I  have  no  data  from  which  I  could  find  out 
concerning  them.  Second.  I  have  no  remembrance  of  her  death  nor  the  man- 
ner of  it.  Now,  in  regard  to  the  statement  I  made  to  Mr.  John  K.  Stringfield. 
I  think  he  has  made  it  too  strong,  for  I  told  him  my  statement  was  from  mem- 
ory only,  and  that  I  could  not  nor  would  not  swear  to  it.  Since  that  time  I 
have  had  sufficient  proof  to  overbalance  my  memory,  and  circumstances  called 
to  mind  that  have  convinced  me  I  was  in  error.  I  simply  stated  what  I 
believed  to  be  true  at  that  time.  I  have  no  interest  in  the  matter  whatever — 
only  want  to  be  understood.  I  trust  that  you  will  oblige  me  by  publishing  the 
above  letter.  Yours  truly, 

"L.  HOLTON." 

It  must  have  been  a  most  pitiful  sight  to  see  six  or  eight  able- 
bodied  men,  headed  by  the  stalwart  Brodhead,  acting  as  chief 
inquisitor,  circling  round  the  reclining  form  of  a  poor  old  invalid, 
trying  to  convince  him  that  he  had  no  memory  and  that  he  was 
a  liar,  prodding  him  with  questions  about  horses  that  he  never 
had  heard  of,  and  when  he  failed  to  tell  them,  torturing  him  with 
remarks  that  if  he  couldn't  answer  that  question  how  could  he 
know  so  well  about  Maria  Russell?  But  with  all  their  tortures 
they  couldn't  force  him  to  say  his  father  did  not  own  Maria  Eussell 
all  her  life  and  that  she  did  not  die  with  two  good  eyes.  It  was 
simply  a  little  Spanish  Inquisition  on  the  waters  of  the  Elkhorn 
from  which  came  the  cry,  ' 'Recant,  Recant,"  dinged  into  the 
ears  of  the  helpless  paralytic.  Still,  helpless  as  he  was  against 
so  many,  he  obeyed  his  conscience  and  maintained  his  integrity, 
notwithstanding  all  tho  satanic  arts  of  Torquemada.  When  all 
else  had  failed  the  war-cry  was  shouted  in  his  ear:  "New  York  is 
trying  to  destroy  the  breeding  interests  of  Kentucky,  and  all  true 
Kentuckians  must  stand  by  each  other  or  we  all  go  under." 
The  old  man  brightened  up  and  said:  "I'm  a  Kentuckian,  but 
you  mustn't  try  to  make  me  a  self-convicted  liar."  The  piece  of 
patchwork  given  above,  in  the  shape  of  a  letter,  was  then 
shaped  up  by  his  tormentors,  for  the  old  man  was  not  able  to 
write  a  line,  and  dispatched  to  the  office  of  Wallace's  Monthly, 
where  it  was  printed  just  as  it  was  received.  Each  one  of  the 


INVESTIGATION    OF    DISPUTED    PEDIGREES.  429 

tormentors  made  a  copy  of  it,  and  no  one  of  them  was  satisfied 
with  it;  even  the  inquisitor-general  said  it  fell  far  short  of  what 
they  wanted,  but  that  by  industriously  speaking  of  it  as  a  re- 
cantation, the  public  would  soon  come  to  treat  it  as  a  recantation. 

When,  after  years  of  fruitless  effort,  Mr.  Brodhead,  manager 
at  Woodburn  Farm,  got  control  of  registration,  he  made  an  early 
move  to  have  the  cloud  removed  from  the  pedigree  of  the  stal- 
lion Lord  Eussell,  and  brought  the  matter  before  the  neocracy  of 
his  own  creation,  of  which  he  was  himself  the  head  and  brains, 
and  the  action  thereon  was  published  in  Wallace's  Monthly  for 
February,  1893.  The  presentation  is  imposing  in  length  and 
abounds  in  many  things  that  have  no  possible  bearing  on  the 
question  at  issue.  Unfortunately  I  have  no  means  of  determin- 
ing the  extent  to  which  the  crime  of  the  interpolation  or  excision 
has  been  made  manifest  except  in  two  of  the  exhibits  which  I 
will  give.  In  Exhibit  1  (Holton's  letter  above)  the  following 
words  are  interpolated:  "and  in  justice  to  all  I  correct  my  state- 
ment." These  words  are  not  very  important  to  the  meaning, 
but  they  are  very  important  as  indicating  the  accuracy,  and  hence 
reliability,  of  a  witness.  In  the  same  exhibit  Mr.  Brodhead  says: 
"I  insist  that  you  will  oblige  me,"  etc.,  while  the  original  uses 
the  word  "trust"  instead  of  "insist."  Again,  Mr.  Brodhead  has 
his  letter  dated  June  11,  1893,  instead  of  June  12,  1883,  as  it  is 
in  the  original.  The  variation  of  the  dates  here  seems  to  have 
had  a  purpose,  whatever  it  may  have  been.  This  letter  must 
have  been  a  great  trouble,  for  I  have  seen  three  or  four  copies 
of  it,  so  called,  and  no  two  of  them  alike. 

I  was  duly  notified  that  the  question  of  Sally  Russell's  pedigree 
would  be  brought  up  at  that  meeting,  and  requested  to  be  there 
to  sustain  my  view  of  that  question.  The  court  and  the  jury 
were  made  up  of  Brodhead's  creatures,  and  organized  simply  to 
register  his  edicts.  The  wise  man  said,  "Surely  in  vain  the  net 
is  spread  in  the  sight  of  any  bird."  The  bird  looked  on,  from  a 
safe  distance,  and  saw  the  fowler  impaled  in  his  own  snare,  by  his 
own  act,  and  his  true  character  revealed  to  the  world.  It  is  very 
difficult  to  understand  just  why  it  should  have  been  deemed 
necessary  to  cut  out  the  very  pith  and  heart  of  Mr.  Holton's 
letter,  when  he  knew  that  it  would  make  no  difference  with  his 
court  whether  there  was  any  evidence  at  all.  Under  the  law  of 
retribution,  a  man's  character  may  be  determined  by  his  own 
acts. 


430 


THE    HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 


HOLTON'S  TRUE  STATEMENT. 
"  FORKS  OF  ELKHORN,  May  24,  1883. 

"This  is  to  certify  that  my  father, 
Captain  John  A.  Hoi  ton,  was  for  a 
number  of  years  interested  with  Cap- 
tain John  Russell  in  a  number  of 
thoroughbreds,  and  they  raced  them 
in  partnership.  When  they  dissolved 
and  divided  the  stock,  I  am  positively 
certain  that  my  father  retained  all  the 
descendants  of  the  Stockholder  mare 
— among  them  Maria  Russell  and  all 
of  her  produce  AND  I  KNOW 
TO  MY  CERTAIN  KNOWLEDGE 
THAT  CAPTAIN  RUSSELL  NEVER 
OWNED  OR  HAD  IN  HIS  POS- 
SESSION THE  MARE  MARIA 
RUSSELL,  OR  ANY  OF  HER  PRO- 
DUCE. And  I  further  know  to  my 
certain  knowledge  that  said  mare, 
Maria  Russell,  had  two  good  eyes 
from  the  time  of  her  foaling  until 
the  day  of  her  death.  If  my  father 
bred  a  mare  to  Boston  in  1848,  I  incline 
to  the  opinion  that  it  was  a  bay  mare 
we  owned  called  Limber,  for  the  rea- 
son that  she,  Limber,  was  very  uncer- 
tain, having  missed  several  seasons. 
There  is  one  point,  however,  that  I 
feel  very  certain  upon,  and  that  is, 
that  neither  my  father  nor  Captain 
Russell,  during  their  racing  or  breed- 
ing career,  ever  owned  a  Boston  filly. 
As  Boston  was  the  most  famous  horse 
of  his  time,  it  is  not  at  all  possible 
that  there  could  have  been  a  Boston 
colt  or  filly  on  my  father's  farm  and  I 
not  knowing  of  the  fact.  I  was  born 
in  the  old  homestead  the  15th  of  No- 
vember, 1820,  and  have  resided  either 
there  or  adjoining  all  my  life  ;  there- 
fore I  had  constant  opportunity  to 
know  all  about  my  father's  stock  of 
horses.  L.  HOLTON. 

"  I  hereby  attest  that  the  above  is  my 
father's  signature. — J.  A.  HOLTON,  son 
of  Llewellyn  Holton." 


BRODHEAD'S    REPRESENTATION 

OF  IT. 
"  FORKS,  ELKHORN,  May  24,  1883. 

"This  is  to  certify  that  my  father, 
Captain  John  A.  Holton,  was  for  a  num- 
ber of  years  interested  with  Captain 
John  Russell  in  a  number  of  thorough- 
breds, and  they  raced  them  in  partner- 
ship. When  they  dissolved,  and  divided 
the  stock,  I  am  positively  certain  that 
my  father  retained  all  the  descendants 
of  the  Stockholder  mare,  among  them 
Maria  Russell  and  all  her  produce,  and 
I  know  to  my  certain  knowledge  that 
said  Maria  Russell  had  two  good  eyes 
from  the  time  of  her  foaling  until  the 
day  of  her  death.  If  my  father  bred  a 
mare  to  Boston  in  1848,  I  incline  to  the 
opinion  that  it  was  a  bay  mare  he 
owned  called  Limber,  for  the  reason 
that  she,  Limber,  was  very  uncertain, 
having  missed  several  seasons.  There 
is  one  point,  however,  that  I  feel  very 
certain  upon,  and  that  is  that  neither 
my  father  nor  Captain  Russell  during 
their  racing  or  breeding  career  ever 
owned  a  Boston  filly.  As  Boston  was 
the  most  famous  horse  of  his  time,  it 
is  not  at  all  possible  that  there  could 
have  been  a  Boston  colt  or  filly  on  my 
father's  farm  and  I  not  knowing  of  the 
fact.  I  was  born  in  the  old  homestead 
the  15th  of  November,  1820,  and  have 
resided  either  there  or  adjoining  all  my 
life  ;  therefore  I  had  constant  oppor- 
tunity to  know  all  about  my  father's 
stock  of  horses.  L.  HOLTON. 

"  I  hereby  attest  that  the  above  is  my 
father's  signature. — J.  A.  HOLTON, 
son  of  L.  Holton." 


INVESTIGATION    OF    DISPUTED    PEDIGREES.  431 

The  deadly  parallel  columns  tell  the  whole  story.  The  central 
and  most  important  fact  in  Mr.  Helton's  statement  has  been  de- 
liberately and  carefully  cut  out  by  Mr.  Brodhead,  and  the  evi- 
dence that  he  did  so  cannot  be  wiped  out  either  by  money  or  by 
the  torture  of  invalids.  The  testimony  of  cold  type  remains  for- 
ever. Has  Mr.  Brodhead,  it  is  asked,  professed  to  have  given 
the  whole  of  Mr.  Holton's  statement,  and  suppressed  a  vital  part 
of  it?  He  has  given  every  word  and  letter  of  the  statement, 
from  the  date  line  to  the  signature,  except  the  one  sentence  that 
is  the  life  and  soul  of  the  whole  statement,  and  that  sentence  I 
have  printed  above  in  capital  letters,  so  that  it  may  be  easily  dis- 
tinguished and  compared.  For  years  I  have  known  that  Mr. 
Brodhead  possessed  most  remarkable  visual  powers.  When  he 
wanted  to  see  a  thing  he  could  see  it  through  a  stone  wall  and 
without  any  assistance  from  the  "X-rays,"  and  when  he  didn't 
want  to  see  a  thing  he  couldn't  see  it  even  when  held  up  to  his 
very  nose  under  an  arc  light.  The  deception  practiced  here 
might  justly  be  designated  by  a  harder  name,  for  it  was  deliber- 
ately planned  and  carried  out  in  order  to  gain  an  end  by  suppress- 
ing the  truth.  Why  did  he  not  free  himself  from  his  marvelous 
powers  of  vision,  and  looking  out  of  the  natural  eyes  of  his  mind? 
see  the  imminent  danger  of  a  terrible  exposure?  In  keeping  back 
part  of  the  truth  with  the  pretension  that  he  had  given  it  all, 
how  could  he  avoid  recalling  the  fate  of  Annanias  and  Sapphira 
for  keeping  back  part  of  the  price  with  the  pretension  that  they 
had  given  it  all? 

As  an  exercise  in  ethical  athletics  I  will  submit  the  following 
abstract  question  to  the  debating  clubs,  especially  in  Kentucky, 
viz.,  "Is  the  man  who  suppresses  the  truth  in  order  to  sustain  a 
fraudulent  pedigree  any  more  worthy  of  belief  than  the  man  who 
made  the  pedigree  and  sold  the  horse  upon  it?" 


CHAPTEE    XXX. 

INVESTIGATION"   OF   DISPUTED   PEDIGREES. — (Continued.) 

How  Belle  of  Wabash  got  her  pedigree — Specimen  of  pedigree  making  in 
that  day  and  locality — Search  for  the  dam  of  Thomas  Jefferson — True 
origin  and  history  of  Belle  of  Wabash — Facts  about  the  old-time  gelding 
Prince — The  truth  about  Waxy,  the  grandaui  of  Sunol — Remarkable  at- 
tempts to  make  a  pedigree  out  of  nothing — How  "Jim"  Eoff  worked  a 
"tenderfoot" — Pedigree  of  American  Eclipse — Pedigree  of  Boston — Tom 
Bowling  and  Aaron  Pennington — Chenery's  Gray  Eagle — Pedigree  of 
George  Wilkes  in  doubt. 

AT  Louisville,  Kentucky,  October,  1860,  a  ten-mile  race  was 
trotted  which  excited  a  good  deal  of  local  interest  and  commento 
The  contestants  in  this  race  were  entered  as  follows: 

"Captain  Magowan,  by  imp.  Sovereign,  dam  by  American  Eclipse." 

"Gipsy  Queen,  by  Wagner,  dam  by  imp.   Glencoe." 

"Belle  of  Wabash  (Indiana  Belle),  by  Bassinger,  dam  by  imp.  William." 

The  names  of  the  parties  making  the  entries  are  given  in  the 
entries  of  the  first  and  second,  and  the  Louisville  Journal  of  the 
week  before  remarks  that  "J.  J.  Alexander  will  represent  his 
State  honorably  with  the  Belle  of  Indiana/'  Captain  Magowan 
held  the  lead  from  start  to  finish,  and  at  the  end  of  the  eighth 
mile,  some  say  the  seventh,  Belle  of  Wabash  was  drawn.  It  will 
be  observed  that,  so  far  as  given,  each  one  of  these  animals  was 
furnished  with  a  first-class  race-horse  pedigree;  for  it  was  then 
held  as  firmly  as  any  religious  tenet  that  no  horse  could  go  that 
distance  at  any  gait  unless  he  was  strictly  thoroughbred,  and,  in 
Kentucky,  if  he  did  not  have  such  a  pedigree  they  gave  him  one 
on  the  spot.  At  that  time  they  never  bothered  their  heads  hunt- 
ing up  the  breeder  of  an  animal  to  learn  how  it  was  bred.  They 
simply  wanted  to  see  the  performance  and  then  make  the  pedi- 
gree to  suit  it.  These  three  pedigrees  were  all  bogus  in  all  their 
elements,  and  I  knew  so  little  of  the  ways  of  the  horse  world,  at 
that  time,  that  I  accepted  and  recorded  them  as  genuine. 


INVESTIGATION   OF    DISPUTED    PEDIGREES.  433 

Captain  Magowan  was  a  roan  gelding,  willful  and  bad  tem- 
pered, and  all  that  seems  to  be  known  about  his  origin  is  the  con- 
ceded fact  that  he  was  bred  in  Kentucky  and  that  he  was  proba- 
bly descended  from  the  tribe  of  Copperbottoms,  or  possibly  the 
Tom  Hals.  The  roan  color  prevailed  in  both  tribes  and  the 
horse  himself  looked  like  the  Copperbottoms. 

Gipsy  Queen,  at  the  time  of  the  above  race  in  1860,  was 
owned  by  a  "sporting  man"  named  George  Bidwell,  of  Chicago, 
or  at  least  she  raced  under  his  direction.  About  the  time  of  this 
race,  Mr.  Thomas  J.  Vail  bought  the  mare  and  took  her  to 
Hartford,  Connecticut.  He  bred  her  to  Toronto  Chief  and  she 
produced  a  black  colt.  The  mare  and  colt  afterward  passed  into 
the  hands  of  Mr.  William  B.  Smith,  and  this  colt  grew  up  to  be 
the  famous  Thomas  Jefferson — "The  Whirlwind  of  the  East." 
In  connection  with  Mr.  Smith  I  devoted  a  good  deal  of  labor  to  a 
futile  search  for  the  origin  and  pedigree  of  this  mare,  and  the  re- 
sult of  our  search  amounted  to  nothing  more  than  a  reasonable 
probability  that  she  was  bred  at  Kochester,  New  York;  was  got 
by  a  son  or  grandson  of  Vermont  Black  Hawk  and  was  taken 
from  there  to  Chicago.  This  latter  point  of  the  transfer  to 
Chicago  seemed  to  be  quite  circumstantially  fixed  in  Mr.  Smith's 
mind. 

Mr.  Allen  W.  Thomson,  of  Woodstock,  Vermont — a  man  of 
great  industry  and  a  lover  of  the  truth  for  the  truth's  sake — also 
made  an  exhaustive  search,  and  from  a  recent  contribution  to  the 
press  he  evidently  thinks  he  has  found  it,  and  possibly  he  has; 
but  while  I  generally  agree  with  Mr.  Thomson's  conclusions,  and 
prize  them  as  honest  and  carefully  reached,  I  am  forced  to  dis- 
sent in  this  case.  Without  going  into  details,  he  brings  the 
mare  from  Williamstown,  Vermont,  and  takes  her  to  Woodstock, 
Illinois,  where  she  is  paired  with  another  black  mare,  and  after 
passing  through  two  or  three  hands  they  at  last  land  in  a  public 
livery  stable  in  Chicago,  and  there  the  identity  of  the  supposi- 
tions Gipsy  Queen  is  lost,  and  so  far  as  known  she  never  came 
out  of  that  stable.  One  or  two  years  afterward  a  black  mare 
from  Chicago,  in  possession  of  George  Bidwell,  appeared  in  some 
public  races,  notably  the  one  given  above,  and  the  conclusion  u 
at  once  reached  that  this  black  mare,  Gipsy  Queen,  was  the 
black  filly  brought  from  Williamstown,  Vermont.  To  this  all 
the  intermediate  owners  between  Williamstown  and  Behrens' 
livery  stable  were  ready  to  insist  that  this  black  mare  was  the 


434  THE   HOESE   OF   AMERICA. 

Williamstown  filly,  but  not  one  of  them  had  ever  seen  the  mare 
that  George  Bidwell  was  handling,  and  some  of  them  evidently 
were  not  worthy  of  belief  if  they  had  seen  her.  There  is  the 
"missing  link"  between  Behrens'  stable  and  George  Bidwell,  that 
has  not  been  supplied  and  probably  never  can  be  supplied.  The 
chances  that  the  Williamstown  filly  was  the  real  Gipsy  Queen, 
all  things  considered,  seem  to  stand  as  about  one  to  a  thousand. 
We  must,  therefore,  conclude  that  we  have  no  satisfactory  in- 
formation as  to  how  or  where  this  mare  was  bred. 

BELLE  OF  WABASH. — My  first  inquiry  about  this  mare  was 
made  more  than  twenty-five  years  ago,  and  I  did  not  then  suppose 
that  her  pedigree  would  ever  become  a  question  of  any  general 
interest.  In  the  first  volume  of  the  Register  I  had  entered  her 
as  a  black  mare,  foaled  1852,  got  by  Bassinger,  son  of  Lieutenant 
Bassinger,  and  dam  said  to  be  by  imported  William  IV.  She  was 
then  owned  by  George  0.  Stevens  of  Milwaukee,  Wisconsin. 
After  her  son — The  Moor — proved  himself  a  great  sire  of  trot- 
ters in  getting  Beautiful  Bells,  Sultan,  and  other  good  ones,  her 
pedigree  became  a  question  of  very  great  importance.  As  the 
search  for  it  would  occupy  more  space,  in  detail,  than  I  can  give 
to  it  in  these  pages,  I  will  here  give  the  references  in  Wallace's 
Monthly,  where  the  principal  correspondence  may  be  found:  Vol. 
XIV.,  p.  510;  XV.,  p.  441;  XVL,  p.  4,3;  and  for  a  complete  un- 
derstanding of  the  matter  the  references  here  given  should  be 
carefully  examined. 

Mr.  S.  D.  Puett,  of  Indiana,  was  the  first  to  give  me  a  starting 
point  in  the  investigation  of  the  pedigree  of  this  mare.  In  all 
that  had  been  said  about  her  I  never  was  able  to  find  a  man  who 
really  knew  anything  about  her  origin,  until  Mr.  Puett  gave  me 
the  address  of  Cyrus  Romaine,  who  had  owned  her  when  very 
young  and  handled  her  for  speed.  He  says  "she  was  sired  by  a 
colt  from  her  own  dam,  that  was  got  by  a  Copperbottom  stal- 
lion from  Kentucky."  lie  was  not  able  to  give  any  information 
about  the  sire  of  the  dam,  and  as  to  the  gait  of  the  dam  he  says: 
"Her  dam  was  a  natural  pacer.  I  cannot  say  as  to  her  sire,  as  he 
was  unbroken  at  the  time."  He  bought  the  mare  at  three  years 
old,  handled  her  one  year  and  sold  her  to  Mr.  J.  J.  Alexander, 
of  Montezuma,  of  the  same  county  (Parke),  in  1856.  Mr.  Alex- 
ander still  owned  her  in  1860  when  she  trotted  in  Louisville,  and 
after  his  death  Williams,  his  trainer,  married  his  widow  and  still 
controlled  the  mare.  Mr.  Romaine  failed  to  give  the  name  of 


INVESTIGATION   OF   DISPUTED   PEDIGREES.  435 

the  breeder  of  the  mare,  which  will  be  explained  further  on. 
Soon  after  he  wrote,  April  26,  1880,  he  removed  to  Nebraska 
and  I  have  not  heard  from  him  since.  In  1857  she  was  trained 
.  for  Mr.  Alexander  by  John  Williams  on  Stroue's  track  at  Bock- 
ville,  Indiana,  the  county  seat  of  Parke  County.  In  1860  she 
was  entered  by  Williams  in  several  races  at  Indianapolis  and  at 
other  points,  and  made  a  record  of  2:40.  About  1865,  or  perhaps 
a  year  or  two  earlier,  she  became  the  property  of  George  C. 
Stevens.  In  his  catalogue  for  1868  she  is  entered  merely  as  "Old 
Belle,"  and  he  knew  nothing  of  her  origin  or  history  till  I  gave 
it  to  him,  along  with  the  humbug  pedigree  that  I  had  copied 
from  the  entries  at  the  Louisville  ten-mile  race. 

Through  the  kindness  of  Mr.  Puett  I  received  the  following 
letter  from  Mr.  Henry  0.  Brown,  a  very  reputable  business  man 
and  a  grain  dealer  in  Rockville,  Parke  County,  Indiana.  This 
letter  from  Mr.  Brown  has  in  it  such  evidence  of  candor  and  in- 
telligence that  I  will  here  insert  it  entire: 

"  DEAR  SIR  :  In  reply  to  your  inquiry  of  the  23d  ult.,  as  to  what  I  know  of 
the  'origin  and  history  of  the  rnare  called  Belle  of  Wabash,'  I  will  give  you 
the  following  facts : 

"  In  the  year  1855,  or  '56,  I  am  not  positive  which,  this  mare,  when  a  three- 
year-old,  was  purchased  by  Cyrus  Rornaine,  then  a  resident  of  this  county,  of 
an  old  farmer  in  Clay  County,  this  State,  paying  $85  for  her.  This  farmer 
lived  at  that  time  about  a  mile  and  a  half  north  of  Brazil,  the  present  county- 
seat  of  Clay  County. 

"  As  to  this  farmer's  name,  neither  myself  nor  Romaine  can  tell.  He  was 
an  old  man  at  that  time,  and  undoubtedly  has  gone  to  his  reward  long  ago. 
Neither  do  we  know  anything  at  all  about  the  pedigree  of  the  mare. 

"  There  is  no  person  living,  so  far  as  I  or  Romaine  know,  that  can  tell  any- 
thing about  her  ancestors,  and  in  my  opinion  it  would  be  impossible,  at  this 
late  day,  to  find  any  one  in  Clay  County  that  could  give  us  any  information  in 
regard  to  her. 

"  The  country  around  Brazil  at  that  time  was  almost  a  wilderness;  now  the 
city  is  spread  out,  and  covers,  no  doubt,  the  farm  where  the  mare  was  foaled. 
Clay  County  is  now  the  center  of  the  Indiana  coal-fields,  and,  of  course,  the 
entire  face  of  the  country  about  there  is  changed  wonderfully  since  1856;  con- 
sequently it  would  be  almost  if  not  quite  impossible  to  find  the  exact  location. 

"  After  keeping  the  mare  eight  or  nine  months,  Romaine  sold  her  to  John 
Alexander,  of  Montezuma,  this  county,  for  $160.  Alexander  soon  after  com- 
menced training  her,  and  in  about  one  year  I  think  he,  or  his  trainer,  John 
Williams,  took  her  to  Kentucky,  and  entered  her  there  in  some  kind  of  races. 
Since  then  you  know  her  history  much  better  than  I  do. 

"  At  the  time  Romaiue  bought  the  mare  he  and  I  were  trading  in  stock  to- 
gether, boarding  at  the  same  house  and  sleeping  in  the  same  bed.  I  mention, 
this  only  that  you  may  understand  that  I  know  what  I  am  writing  about. 


436  THE    HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

"  I  am  truly  sorry  that  I  cannot  give  you  the  true  pedigree  of  tlie  mare,  but 
it  cannot  be  done.  There  is  no  man  here  or  anywhere  else  that  can  tell  you 
anything  more  than  I  have  stated  herein. 

"You  will  no  doubt  think  that  there  is  considerable  of  superfluous  matter 
in  this  letter,  but  I  do  not  see  how  I  could  tell  you  what  I  wanted  to  in  fewer 
words. 

"  Everything  stated  herein  is  truth,  and,  if  necessary,  1  am  willing  to  make 
affidavit  to  the  same  at  any  time.  Very  truly  yours, 

"HENRYC.    BROWN." 

Mr.  Romaine's  representation  amounted  to  nothing  definite  or 
satisfactory  about  the  pedigree  of  Belle  of  Wabash,  because  he 
failed  to  give  the  name  and  location  of  her  breeder,  but  Mr. 
Brown's  letter  clears  this  all  up  on  the  grounds  that  Mr.  Romaine 
really  did  not  know  the  breeder's  name.  Whatever  her  sire  and 
whatever  her  dam,  we  may  feel  sure  they  were  not  trotting-bred, 
although  she  was  a  trotter.  We  are  left,  therefore,  to  conclude 
that,  as  in  a  thousand  other  cases,  this  mare  was  a  pacing-bred 
trotter.  The  one  point  that  is  vital  is  settled  by  Mr,  Brown,  as 
he  was  with  Mr.  Romaine  when  he  bought  the  mare  and  knew 
all  about  the  transaction.  He  cannot  remember  the  breeder's 
name,  but  he  locates  him  as  "living  a  mile  and  a  half  north  of 
Brazil/'  and  that  it  is  now  all  cut  up  into  residence  and  mining 
lots.  This  seems  to  fix  the  location  of  the  breeder  beyond  all 
doubt.  This  old  man  seems  to  have  been  a.  pioneer  in  a  very 
poor  county  and  still  a  comparative  wilderness  when  this  transac- 
tion took  place.  At  that  time  the  coal  fields  had  not  been 
touched,  and  it  is  wholly  beyond  belief  that  he  took  his  unknown 
old  mare  out  of  his  own  county,  across  the  adjoining  county  of 
Parke  and  into  Vermilion  County,  wherever  in  it  Mr.  Weisiger 
lived,  to  have  her  bred  to  his  part-bred  stallion  Bassinger.  And 
then  when  he  came  to  sell  the  foal  at  three  years  old  for  $85, 
when  horses  were  high,  can  we  believe  he  would  do  so  with- 
out ever  mentioning  how  the  filly  was  bred?  The  chain  of 
ownership  is  complete,  as  she  passed  from  her  unnamed  breeder 
to  Mr.  Romaine,  from  him  to  Mr.  Alexander,  in  whose  hands 
she  did  her  trotting,  and  then  to  Mr.  Williams,  and  there  is  no 
place  for  the  Louisville  humbug  pedigree  to  come  in.  She  got 
her  bogus  pedigree  at  the  same  time  and  in  the  same  way  that 
Magowan  and  Gipsy  Queen  got  theirs,  and  there  was  not  a  single 
shadow  of  truth  in  any  one  of  them.  The  tenacity  with  which 
some  people  hold  on  to  a  "thoroughbred"  origin  for  their  trot- 
ters when  the  evidence  is  all  against  them  has  long  been  a  mys- 


INVESTIGATION   OF   DISPUTED    PEDIGREES.  437 

tery  to  honest  folks,  who  are  able  to  look  at  things  as  they  are; 
but  it  is  not  difficult  to  understand  the  phenomenon  when  we 
analyze  the  reasons  for  it.  First,  the  owner  is  anxious  to  hold 
on  to  all  he  can  possibly  claim  in  the  way  of  aristocratic  descent 
with  the  hope  that  it  may  help  his  sales;  and  second,  there  are 
always  a  few  "featherheads  "  with  golden  pockets  ready  to  buy 
that  kind  of  stuff,  because  they  have  never  gone  far  enough  in 
horse  history  to  be  able  to  kick  themselves  loose  from  the  swad- 
dling clothes  of  their  infantile  prejudices. 

PRINCE. — The  chestnut  gelding  Prince  was  one  of  the  great 
trotters  in  the  early  "fifties."  He  was  pitted  against  Hero,  the 
pacing  son  of  Harris'  Hambletonian,  Lantern  and  others.  As 
usual  at  that  time  he  was  given  a  thoroughbred  pedigree,  which 
I  was  then  led  to  accept,  without  really  knowing  anything  about 
his  origin.  He  was  represented  to  have  been  bred  in  Kentucky, 
and  owned  by  R.  Ten  Broeck  of  that  State.  Then  would  natu- 
rally follow  a  thoroughbred  pedigree  coming  from  that  State,  and 
nobody  doubted  it  for  a  long  time.  He  was  represented  to  be  by 
Woodpecker,  son  of  Bertrand;  dam  by  imported  Sarpedon; 
grandam  said  to  be  thoroughbred.  When  he  started  in  his  ten- 
mile  race  against  Hero,  William  T.  Porter  said  he  was  by  Wood- 
pecker, and  out  of  that  grew  the  pedigree  above.  In  the  old 
Spirit  of  the  Times,  of  October  11,  1856,  there  is  a  short  com- 
munication signed  "Hiram,"  in  which  is  the  only  circumstantial 
account  of  the  origin  of  Prince  that  I  have  ever  seen.  It  is  im- 
plied by  the  writer  that  he  was  bred  by  a  Mr.  Dey,  of  Chautauqua. 
County,  New  York,  for  he  says  he  was  got  by  "an  old  chestnut 
horse  called  Duroc,  from  Long  Island,"  and  came  of  the  Dey 
Mare.  It  seems  that  Dey  sold  the  colt  to  a  young  man  named 
Worden,  and  he  was  first  known  as  "the  Worden  colt."  He  was 
then  sold  to  Manley  Griswold,  and  from  Griswold  to  Daniel  Van- 
vliet,  who  sold  him  in  Buffalo  to  Bennett  &  Jones  (or  Thomas), 
for  one  thousand  dollars,  and  they  sold  him  to  William  Whelan, 
of  Long  Island,  for  fifteen  hundred  dollars.  "Hiram"  carries 
the  history  of  the  horse  no  further,  as  he  had  then  placed 
him  in  the  hands  of  the  great  artists  of  the  trotting  world. 
Of  his  sire,  "Old  Duroc,"  he  says  he  was  taken  from  Long  Island 
to  Villenova,  in  Chautauqua  County,  by  a  merchant  of  that 
place,  named  George  Hopkins,  and  after  getting  about  twenty 
colts  he  died.  Among  these  twenty  we  find  Prince  and  another 
afterward  known  as  the  Walker  Horse,  which  achieved  a  high  local 


438  THE    HOUSE    OF    AMERICA. 

reputation  as  a  sire  of  trotters  and  I  have  frequently  met  with  his 
cross  in  the  pedigrees  of  good  animals.  This  showing  is  not  abso- 
lutely complete,  but  it  is  infinitely  better  than  any  other  that 
has  ever  been  given  to  the  public. 

WAXY,  the  grandam  of  Sunol.  When  the  two-year-old  filly 
Sunol  in  1888  came  out  and  trotted  a  mile  in  2:18,  it  fairly  took 
one's  breath  away,  and  the  first  question'  on  every  tongue  was, 
"How  is  she  bred?"  She  was  represented  to  be  by  Electioneer, 
out  of  AVaxanaby  General  Benton,  and  she  out  of  Waxy  by  Lexing- 
ton, and  "thoroughbred."  When  asked  who  bred  her  and  how  it 
was  known  that  Waxy  was  by  Lexington,  the  answer  came  back 
that  the  breeder  was  not  known — that  she  had  been  taken  across 
the  plains  by  a  man  who  died  on  the  way.  The  search  then 
commenced  for  the  breeder  of  Waxy  and  the  identification  of  her 
dam.  As  the  search  progressed  there  were  some  very  curious 
things  developed.  When  it  started  in  the  spring  it  was  a  year- 
ling stallion  colt,  and  when  it  reached  California,  in  the  fall,  it 
was  a  two-year-old  filly.  More  than  this,  it  was  shown  by  in- 
dubitable proofs,  such  as  they  were,  that  she  had  two  dams,  and 
then  shown  that  she  had  no  dam  at  all.  With  such  a  Kentucky 
muddle  on  hand  there  was  an  excellent  opportunity  for  a  con- 
troversy that  might  possibly  become  somewhat  heated.  This  con- 
troversy is  famous  in  the  history  of  the  exposures  of  untruthful 
pedigrees,  and  I  will  give  a  brief  outline  of  it,  with  some  speci- 
mens of  the  evidence  adduced  to  sustain  it. 

Early  in  the  spring  of  1864  Mr.  John  P.  Welch,  an  intelligent 
man,  trained  to  the  profession  of  civil  engineer,  reached  the  blue 
grass  region  of  Kentucky  for  the  purpose  of  securing  and  taking 
across  the  plains  a  band  of  well-bred  horses  to  California.  In 
this  venture  he  was  backed  by  Mr.  John  Anderson,  a  wealthy  gen- 
tleman of  the  latter  State.  Mr.  Welch  was  successful  in  perfect- 
ing his  arrangements,  and  when  on  the  very  eve  of  starting  he 
•sent  forward  a  complete  inventory  of  all  the  animals  he  had  in 
his  band  and  sent  this  inventory  to  the  California  Spirit  of  the 
limes,  in  which  paper  it  was  published  May  14,  1864,  and  is  as 
follows: 

1.  Bay   inare,  6  years  old,    by  imp.  Sovereign,  dam  by  Glencoe,  g.d.  Ann 
Merry. 

2.  Bay  filly,  3  years,  by  Vandal,   dam  Miss  Singleton  by  Old  Denmark,  g.d. 
Bellatnira  by  Monarch. 

3.  Bay  filly,  2  years  old,  by  Mambrino  Chief,  dam  by  Commodore. 


INVESTIGATION   OF   DISPUTED   PEDIGREES.  439 

4.  Bay  horse.  3  years  old,  by  Mainbrino  Chief,  dain  by  Gray  Eagle. 

5.  Black  colt.  2  years  old,  by  Kt.  of   St.  George,  dain  (daui  of  Capitola)  by 
Margrave. 

6.  Bay  mare,  9  years  old,  by  imp.  Glencoe,  dam  by  Rudolph,  g.d.  Belle  An- 
derson. 

7.  Bay  filly,  2  years  old,  by  Revenue,  dam  Sally  Morgan  by  Emancipation. 

8.  Chestnut  filly,  4  yearsold,  by  Vandal,  dam  by  Gray  Eagle,  g.d.  Churchill. 

9.  Chestnut  mare  by  Wagner  (dam  of  No.  11). 

10.  Bay  mare  by  Sovereign. 

11.  Black  colt,  2  years  old,  by  Kt.  of  St.  George,  dam  No.  9,  by  Wagner. 

12.  Chestnut  filly,  3  years  old,  by  Jack  Gamble,  dam  Betty  King  by  Boston. 

13.  Bay  mare,   6  years  old,  by  imp.  Sovereign,  dam  by  Mirabeau,  g.d.  Ara- 
bella. 

14.  Captain  Beard,  b.s.,  9  years  old,  by  imp.  Yorkshire,  dam  by  imp.  Glen- 
coe, g.d.  by  imp.  Leviathan,  g.g.d.  by  Stockholder. 

15.  Gray  mare  by  Gray  Eagle,  dam  Mary  Morris,  by  Medoc. 
18.  Hope,  ch.  in.  by  Glencoe,  dam  Susette  by  Aratus. 

17.  Bay  mare  by  Sovereign,  dam  by  Gray  Eagle. 

18.  Chestnut  filly,  2  years  old,  by  Bob  Johnson,  dam  by  Brawner's  Eclipse. 

19.  Chestnut  filly,  3  years  old,  by  Kt.  of  St.  George,  dam  by  Gray  Eagle. 

20.  Bay  colt,   one  year  old,  by  Lexington,  dam  by  Gray  Eagle,  g.d.  Mary 
Morris. 

21.  Ch.  c..  2  years  old  by  Ringgold,  darn  Hope  by  Glencoe. 
22  and  23.   Pair  3:00  six-year-old  trotting  mares. 

24.  Black  mare,  trotter,  8  years  old;  time,  2:50. 

25.  Bay  gelding,  trotter,  5  years  old;  time,  near  3:00. 

26.  Bay  mare  for  show,  but  not  to  go. 

From  this  inventory  we  must  conclude  that  Mr.  Welch  was  a 
careful  and  methodical  man.  He  knew  he  had  twenty-six  animals 
ready  to  start,  and  after  he  had  written  off  the  descriptions  and 
pedigrees  of  these  -  twenty-six  animals  he  verified  his  work  by 
numbering  them  from  one  to  twenty-six  inclusive,  and  then  he 
knew  he  had  not  omitted  any  one.  This  inventory  is  the  basis  of 
the  whole  truth  in  this  matter,  and  is  the  only  evidence  in  the 
wide  world  of  what  animals  Mr.  Welch  started  with  to  California. 
As  this  is  the  vital  and  only  starting  point  to  reach  the  truth,  I 
trust  my  readers  will  examine  it  again  carefully  and  see  whether 
it  includes  any  filly  or  mare  by  Lexington,  of  any  age.  When 
you  ask  any  of  these  "more-running-blood-in-the-trotter"  peo- 
ple who  took  Waxy,  the  phantom  daughter  of  Lexington,  to 
California,  you  will  get  an  evasive  answer,  and  when  pressed 
they  will  at  last  say,  John  P.  Welch.  Now,  as  to  John  P. 
Welch,  "he  being  dead  yet  speaketh."  From  his  unknown  grave 
he  tells  these  people  they  are  trying  to  establish  what  is  not  true, 


440  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

and  with  his  ghostly  finger  points  to  the  inventory  and  demands, 
"Where  is  the  Lexington  filly  in  that  list?  You  are  trying  to 
displace  the  truth  with  a  falsehood,"  and  he  drives  this  charge 
home  to  the  heart  of  each  one  of  them. 

Here  we  might  close  this  case  and  leave  it  to  the  enlightened 
judgment  of  all  intelligent  and  honest  people,  for  there  is  not 
a  scintilla  of  evidence  that  any  two-year-old  daughter  of  Lexing- 
ton was  taken  to  California  in  1864.  Until  this  evidence  is  ad- 
duced, no  attempt  to  overthrow  the  contents  of  John  P.  Welch's 
inventory  has  a  single  peg  to  stand  on.  But  I  am  not  yet  done 
with  some  of  the  peculiarities  that  have  heen  developed  in  this 
case,  for  long  ago  I  learned  in  this  pedigree  business, 

"  That  for  ways  that  are  dark, 
And  for  tricks  that  are  vain, 
The  heathen  Chinee  is  peculiar." 

At  this  point  the  case  bifurcates,  one  fork  leading  to  the  Grey 
Eagle  mare  as  the  dam  of  Waxy,  and  the  other  to  the  Brawner's 
Eclipse  mare,  and  I  think  my  language  will  not  be  wholly  un- 
parliamentary when  I  pronounce  them  both  frauds.  Mr.  Levi  S. 
Gould,  a  worthy  business  man  of  Boston,  whom  I  have  always 
esteemed  as  honest,  was  the  first  to  dig  up  this  whole  matter  in 
the  columns  of  the  California  Spirit  of  the  Times,  and  the  first  to 
give  the  above  inventory  to  the  public.  He  traveled  thousands 
of  miles  and  claimed  to  have  traced  Waxy  to  the  stable  of  her 
breeder,  Philip  Swigert,  of  Frankfort,  .Kentucky.  The  full 
account  of  his  laborious  trip  was  published  in  Wallace's  Monthly 
for  March,  1889,  p.  17.  In  the  inventory  he  found  one  animal 
got  by  Lexington,  but  this  was  a  bay  colij  of  1863,  and  out  of  the 
Grey  Eagle  mare,  but  he  wanted  a  chestnut  filly.  After  study- 
ing the  matter  over,  he  concluded  that  this  "bay  colt"  was  a 
typographical  error  for  "chestnut  filly"  and  that  this  established 
the  pedigree  of  Waxy.  He  interviewed  a  number  of  people  who 
had  known  of,  or  had  been  in  some  way  connected  with,  the 
Welch  venture,  and  they  were  all  able  to  confirm  his  discovery  of 
the  typographical  error,  and  could  recount  to  a  nicety  their  dis- 
tinct recollections  of  the  sorrel  filly  by  Lexington,  out  of  the 
Grey  Eagle  mare.  These  people  seemed  to  possess  the  most  as- 
tonishing memories,  and  the  color,  breeding  and  age  of  a  filly  they 
had  not  seen  nor  heard  of  for  a  quarter  of  a  century  all  came 
back  to  them  with  as  much  freshness  as  though  the  events  had 


INVESTIGATION   OF   DISPUTED   PEDIGREES.  441 

occurred  yesterday.  Then  there  .was  a  peculiar  element  in  their 
memories,  for  they  could  recall  everything  about  this  one  filly 
and  nothing  about  any  of  the  others.  At  last  Mr.  Gould  reached 
Mr.  Brodhead,  of  Kentucky,  where  the  "finishing  touches"  were 
put  upon  the  pedigree  of  Waxy.  Mr.  Satterwhite  did  not  reach 
Woodburn  till  after  Mr.  Gould  had  left,  but  that  did  not  prevent 
him  from  making  a  "statement"  that  exactly  fitted  the  theory  of 
the  pedigree  as  matured  by  Mr.  Gould  and  Mr.  Brodhead.  He 
had  been  Mr.  Philip  Swigert's  foreman  in  1864,  and  had  a  right 
to  know  something  of  the  transfer  of  some  eight  or  ten  head  of 
stock  from  Mr.  Swigert  to  Mr.  Welch  in  the  spring  of  that  year. 
Satterwhite  was  quite  too  good  a  witness,  as  he  disclosed  his 
cramming  frightfully.  He  remembered  "the  light  chestnut  filly, 
by  Lexington  and  out  of  the  Grey  Eagle  mare,"  with  great  dis- 
tinctness and  was  sure  she  was  foaled  in  1863.  In  no  single  case 
was  he  certain  except  in  the  filly  by  Lexington,  and  in  no  single 
case  was  he  able  to  give  the  ages  of  the  other  young  things  cor- 
rectly. After  Satterwhite  made  his  visit  to  Woodburn,  Mr. 
Brodhead  wrote  Mr.  Gould  as  follows: 

"  Satterwhite  says  Dick  Jackson  was  with  Welch.  I  think,  with  what  you 
have,  the  pedigree  of  Waxy  is  conclusively  proved,  and  you  can  get  your  arti- 
cle ready.  The  sooner  it  is  published  the  better.  I  forwarded  some  letters 
to  you,  and  I  hope  they  gave  you  additional  information." 

It  will  be  remembered  that  Mr.  Gould  started  out  on  the  as- 
sumption that,  as  there  was  but  one  animal  in  the  inventory  by 
Lexington  and  that  was  a  bay  colt  of  1863,  that  "colt,"  he  argued, 
was  a  typographical  error,  and  instead  of  "bay  colt"  it  should 
read  "sorrel  filly."  On  this  very  uncertain  basis  he  worked 
throughout.  On  this  basis  he  collected  all  his  futile  statements. 
On  this  basis,  and  to  lend  a  helping  hand,  Satterwhite  testified; 
.and  on  this  basis  Brodhead  wrote,  "With  what  you  have,  the 
pedigree  of  Waxy  is  conclusively  proved."  Now  that  Mr.  Brod- 
head is  satisfied  and  that  Mr.  Bruce  promptly  entered  Waxy  in 
his  Stud  Book  as  by  Lexington  and  out  of  the  Grey  Eagle  mare, 
we  must  drop  the  whimsical  idea  of  the  "typographical  error" 
and  consider  whether  the  bay  colt  of  1863,  by  Lexington,  did 
really  become  a  sorrel  filly  of  1862  when  he  reached  California  a 
few  months  later. 

1.  The  bay  colt,  No.  20,  of  the  inventory,  was  the  only  animal 
in  the  band  by  Lexington.  He  was  a  foal  of  1863,  and  was  a  year 
younger  than  any  of  the  others. 


442  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

'2.  Ill  speaking  of  the  losses,  by  death  on  the  route,  of  some  of 
the  more  noted  animals,  Mr.  Anderson  enumerates  the  noted 
stallion  Captain  Beard,  and  a  very  fine  yearling  colt  by  Lexing- 
ton, called  Frank.  Here  perished  the  only  foal  by  Lexington  in 
the  band,  and  we  may  as  well  bury  Mr.  Gould's  and  Mr.  Brod- 
head's  "typographical  error"  with  him,  for  the  colt  kicked  it  to 
death  before  he  died. 

3.  When  the  band  reached  California  there  were  several  addi- 
tions smuggled  into  it  as  being  part  of  the  originals  from  Ken- 
tucky, and  among  these  additions  was  the  light  chestnut  filly  that 
has  been  since  known  as  Waxy,  given  as  a  foal  of  1862,  and  got 
by  Lexington,  dam  unknown. 

4.  As  Mr.  Brodhead  had  proved  conclusively,  from  the  records 
at  Woodburn,  that  Mr.  Swigert's  Grey  Eagle  mare  was  barren  in 
1862,  the  "typographical  error"  parties  found  themselves  placed 
"between  the  devil  and  the  deep  sea." 

This  outside  filly  that  had  been  smuggled  into  the  band  of 
Kentuckians  was  advertised  along  with  them,  as  a  foal  of  1862, 
in  the  fall  of  1864;  she  was  sold  as  a  foal  of  1862;  she  was  entered 
in  a  sweepstake  for  three-year-olds  as  a  foal  of  1862;  she  was  ex- 
hibited at  a  horse  show  as  a  foal  of  1862;  she  started  to  run  the 
only  race  she  ever  attempted  as  a  foal  of  1862,  and  proving  her- 
self utterly  worthless  as  a  race  mare,  she  was  given  away  on  the 
spot  as  a  foal  of  1862. 

As  the  only  representative  of  Lexington  in  the  band  was  "the 
yearling  bay  colt  Frank,"  as  shown  by  Mr.  Anderson,  the  partner 
of  Mr.  Welch;  and  as  the  records  at  Woodburn  had  clearly  and 
distinctly  shown  that  Swigert's  Grey  Eagle  mare  was  barren  in 
1862,  the  bottom  was  out  of  the  conspiracy  and  it  was  abandoned. 
There  was  a  little  fussing  about  the  possibility  that  there  might 
have  been  a  mistake  and  that  Waxy  might  have  been  a  foal  of 
1863  after  all,  but  it  amounted  to  nothing  more  than  the  en- 
feebled squeak  of  an  asthmatic  mouse  and  then  all  was  quiet. 

Before  passing  to  the  other  branch  of  the  investigation,  this 
seems  to  be  the  proper  place  to  speak  of  the  incidents  of  the  sale' 
and  its  sequences  at  the  Fair  Grounds  at  San  Jose,  January  3, 
1865.  There  were  some  twelve  or  fifteen  head,  that  had  been 
previously  advertised,  offered  at  public  sale,  and  a  number  of 
those  were  sold,  all  indeed  in  which  this  inquiry  has  any  interest. 
When  the  stock  arrived  at  San  Jose,  there  was  a  good  deal  of 
confusion,  and  it  is  just  possible  that  some  of  them  were  not. 


INVESTIGATION    OF    DISPUTED    PEDIGREES.  443 

correctly  placed.  The  only  discrepancy  which  I  have  found  be- 
tween Mr.  Welch's  inventory  and  the  facts  is  in  the  color  of  the 
filly  No.  18,  that  appears  in  the  inventory  as  a  chestnut,  but  is 
advertised  and  sold  as  a  bay.  This  mistake  in  color  is  not  infre- 
quent in  the  spring  of  the  year  before  the  old  coat  is  shed,  and  I 
think  it  may  be  reasonably  accounted  for  on  this  ground.  James 
L.  Eoff,  well  known  from  ocean  to  ocean  as  the  king  of  all  "horse 
sharps,"  seems  to  have  taken  a  good  deal  of  interest  in  assorting 
the  animals  and  in  picking  up  scraps  of  information  from  the 
boys  who  had  come  with  them.  At  the  same  time  he  was  an  ex- 
cellent judge  of  racing  stock,  and  as  silent  as  the  grave  to  the  vic- 
tims whom  he  sought  to  mislead  and  then  beat.  In  this  way  he 
soon  knew  more  about  the  breeding  of  the  animals  than  those  in 
charge  of  them.  Mr.  William  Woodward  seems  to  have  been  his 
friend  (?)  with  plenty  of  money,  but  a  perfect  "tenderfoot"  in 
the  mysteries  of  the  race  horse.  No  doubt  he  pointed  out  to  Mr. 
Woodward  the  so-called  Lexington  filly  and  advised  him  to  buy 
her,  assuring  him  that  he  wanted  her  himself,  but  if  he  wanted 
to  take  a  little  fly  in  racing  he  would  not  bid  against  him.  The 
sale  came  off,  and  Eoff  ran  up  the  Revenue  filly,  out  of  Sally 
Morgan,  to  three  hundred  and  twenty-five  dollars  and  got  her,  it 
is  said,  for  Theodore  Winters.  WThen  they  came  to  the  filly  by 
Bob  Johnson,  out  of  the  mare  by  Brawner's  Eclipse,  Eoff  bought 
her  at  two  hundred  and  fifty  dollars  for  himself,  and  named 
her  Lilly  Hitchcock.  The  next  animal  sold  was  the  filly  by  Lex- 
ington, dam  unknown,  and  she  was  bought  by  William  Wood- 
ward at  two  hundred  and  fifty  dollars,  and  he  named  her  Waxy. 
The  sale  was  slimly  attended  and  much  of  the  stock  was  bid  in 
for  the  owner,  Mr.  John  Anderson.  That  night  the  wine  flowed 
very  freely,  as  it  was  the  initiation  of  the  "tenderfoot,"  Mr. 
Woodward,  into  the  ranks  of  running-horse  men.  After  they  all 
"got  hot"  (except  Eoff),  a  sweepstakes  was  opened  for  the  three 
fillies,  Ada  C.  (the  Revenue  filly),  Lilly  Hitchcock  and  Waxy,  at 
two  hundred  and  fifty  dollars  each,  and  Eoff  was  careful  to  see 
that  it  was  made  "play  or  pay."  The  race  was  a  dash  of  a  mile 
and  a  quarter,  and  it  took  place  nearly  twelve  months  after  the 
match  was  made.  Eoff  won  easily  with  Lilly  Hitchcock,  and 
Waxy  was  so  badly  beaten  that  Woodward  gave  her  away  on  the 
spot  and  "swore  off"  ever  owning  another  running  horse.  Thus 
Eoff's  cunning  carried  his  plot  through,  without  a  break  at  any 
point.  From  the  hour  he  bought  this  filly  he  stoutly  maintained 


444  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

she  was  by  Lexington  and  out  of  the  Brawner's  Eclipse  mare. 
She  ran  all  her  races  under  this  pedigree  and  never  was  chal- 
lenged, and  if  ever  there  was  a  mare  in  California  bred  in  this 
way,  this  is  likely  to  be  the  mare.  We  can  understand  just  how 
he  could  have  discovered  where  Waxy  came  from,  and  that  she 
never  saw  Kentucky,  and  on  this  knowledge  he  based  the  game 
he  played  on  poor  Woodward. 

After  the  failure  to  establish  the  claim  that  Waxy  came  out  of 
Philip  Swigert's  Grey  Eagle  mare  and  publicly  confessing  that 
the  evidence  upon  which  Mr.  Gould  and  Mr.  Brodhead  based 
their  conclusions  was  fallacious  and  the  conclusions  themselves 
incorrect,  the  advocates  of  "more  running  blood  in  the  trotter" 
pulled  themselves  together  for  another  bout.  What  purported 
to  be  an  old  document  was  dug  up  somewhere — indeed  I  am  told 
there  were  two  of  them  dug  up,  one  in  Kentucky  and  the  other 
somewhere  on  the  Pacific  coast — purporting  to  be  duplicates  of  an 
agreement  entered  into,  in  March,  1864,  between  John  P.  Welch, 
of  California  and  Philip  Swigert,  of  Kentucky,  by  which  Welch 
agreed  to  take  certain  blood  horses  to  California  and  sell  or  breed 
them  on  the  shares,  etc.  This  document  possessed  all  the 
paraphernalia  of  authenticity,  with  government  stamp,  witnesses 
to  the  signatures  of  the  contracting  parties,  etc.  This  docu- 
ment (I  don't  know  which  "duplicate")  was  shown  to  me  in 
April,  1891,  and  at  the  first  glance,  and  without  reading  a  word 
except  the  date,  it  astounded  me.  There  was  a  paper  purporting 
to  be  twenty-seven  years  old,  and  it  looked  as  bright  and  fresh  as 
though  it  had  been  written  within  twenty-seven  hours.  There 
was  no  fading  of  the  luster  of  the  ink  and  there  was  no  ageing  in 
the  color  of  the  paper.  Having  devoted  a  great  deal  of  time  to 
the  examination  of  writings,  varying  in  age  from  one  day  to  a 
hundred  years  and  more,  and  this  experience  extending  through 
many  years,  I  ought  to  be  a  fairly  competent  judge  of  the  effects 
of  age  on  ink  and  paper.  Here  was  a  paper  purporting  to  be 
over  a  quarter  of  a  century  old  with  all  the  newness  of  yesterday, 
and  when  Mr.  J.  C.  Simpson  showed  it  to  me  I  was  impressed 
with  the  belief,  on  this  one  point  of  evidence  alone,  that  it  was 
spurious,  and  that  Mr.  Simpson  had  been  made  a  victim  by  some 
rascally  scrivener.  With  so  much  for  the  appearance  of  the  paper, 
on  its  face,  we  will  now  examine  the  contents  and  see  whether 
any  evidence  can  there  be  found  that  will  throw  further  light  on 
the  question  of  its  authenticity.  Unfortunately  I  have  not  what 


INVESTIGATION   OF   DISPUTED   PEDIGREES.  445. 

purports  to  be  the  original  of  this  document  before  me,  and  I 
must  therefore  depend  upon  my  memory  and  upon  what  Judge 
Halsey,  as  attorney  for  Mr.  Brodhead,  has  printed  as  the  con- 
tents. In  giving  the  list  of  animals  I  will  follow  the  order  of  the 
"document"  and  place  before  each  one,  for  convenience  of  refer- 
ence, the  number  attached  to  that  animal  in  Mr.  Welch's  original 
inventory. 

lo    One  gray  mare,  by  Grey  Eagle,  out  of  Mary  Morris. 

16.  One  sorrel  mare,  Hope,  by  Glencoe. 

17.  Sovereign  filly,  oat  of  Grey  Eagle  inare,  four  years  old. 
8.  Vandal  filly,  out  of  bay  Grey  Eagle  mare,  four  years  old. 

18.  One  two-year-old  filly,  by  Bob  Johnson,  out  of  bay  Grey  Eagle  mare. 

19.  One  two-year-old  filly  by  Lexington. 

20.  One  yearling  colt,  by  Lexington,  out  of  Grey  Eagle  mare. 

21.  One  two-year-old  filly,  by  Kinggold,  out  of  Hope. 

In  looking  over  this  list  there  are  several  points  suggested  for 
remark  and  they  all  have  a  bearing,  more  or  less  direct,  on  the 
question  at  issue.  The  list  seems  to  have  been  prepared,  if  pre- 
pared by  Mr.  Swigert,  very  hurriedly  and  without  sufficient  re- 
gard to  completeness  or  accuracy.  He  started  off,  possibly  to 
make  a  careful  list,  as  he  gave  the  color  of  the  two-year-old  mares 
at  the  head  and  then  dropped  all  purpose  of  completeness  and 
gave  no  colors  nor  descriptions  to  those  that  followed.  He  gives 
No.  21  as  a  filly  when  it  was  a  colt,  and  so  appears  in  the  inven- 
tory, was  sold  as  a  colt  with  pedigree  at  San  Jose,  January,  1865, 
and  again,  with  the  same  pedigree,  at  The  Willows,  February, 
1866.  Under  ordinary  conditions  the  statement  of  the  breeder 
should  be  conclusive  against  all  others,  but  in  this  case  the  evi- 
dent hurry  and  absence  of  descriptions  have  destroyed  the  value 
of  the  whole  list,  in  great  degree,  as  evidence  that  could  be  ac- 
cepted with  safety.  We  must,  therefore,  look  for  something 
in  the  way  of  evidence  more  deliberative  and  descriptive  in  its 
preparation,  and  this  we  find  in  the  joint  work  of  Mr.  Swigert  and 
Mr.  Welch,  as  embodied  in  the  inventory.  When  the  descrip- 
tions of  the  animals  were  taken,  both  men  were  equally  interested 
in  accuracy  and  completeness,  both  were  present,  and  probably 
the  animals  were  before  them.  Hence  my  infinitely  greater  con- 
fidence in  the  deliberative  work  of  the  two,  as  found  in  the  in 
ventory. 

The  one  point  about  which  all  this  hubbub  has  been  raised   is 
the  so-called  "Lexington  filly/'  that  appears  as  the  sixth  in  the 


446  THE   HOUSE   OF   AMERICA. 

above  list.  She  has  no  number  attached  to  her  name,  and  this 
means  that  she  was  not  in  the  inventory,  and  it  means  more  than 
this;  for  it  is,  in  a  manner,  the  dying  testimony  of  an  honest  man 
that  he  took  no  Lexington  filly  to  California,  and  fortunately 
this  testimony  has  been  preserved.  The  methods  introduced  to 
prove  that  Welch  did  take  her  are  the  methods  of  the  imbecile. 
Let  us  admit,  for  the  moment,  that  Swigert  had  a  Lexington 
filly  and  that  she  was  in  a  contract  with  Welch  to  be  taken  to 
California;  does  that  prove  that  Welch  took  her,  when  he  says 
he  did  not?  There  are  hundreds  and  hundreds  of  people  every 
year  who  buy  steamship  tickets  to  go  to  Europe  who  fail  to  go. 
The  records  of  Mr.  Swigert's  ticket  office  show  that  the  ticket 
was  bought,  but  they  fail  to  show  that  the  purchaser  went  aboard 
the  ship.  You  must  go  to  Purser  Welch  and  get  a  list  of  passen- 
gers actually  on  board  in  order  to  determine  who  did  and  who 
did  not  go.  Accidents,  sickness  and  death  are  all  factors  in  the 
movements  of  horses  just  as  they  are  in  the  movements  of  human 
beings.  It  is  the  observation  of  a  long  lifetime  that  horsemen 
are  never  so  near  their  best  as  fools  as  when  they  attempt  to 
establish  a  fraudulent  pedigree  by  evidence  that  utterly  fails  to 
cover  the  case.  They  claim  to  have  found  a  ticket  that  would 
carry  Waxy  to  California,  and  whether  genuine  or  counterfeit 
they  rely  wholly  on  this  ticket  as  evidence  that  she  went.  The 
master  of  the  vessel  affirms  she  was  not  aboard  his  vessel,  and  in 
support  of  this  he  shows  a  complete  list  and  description  of  the 
passengers  numbered  from  one  to  twenty-six  inclusive.  This  is 
the  whole  thing  in  a  nutshell.  The  proof  is  clear  and  conclusive 
that  Mr.  Welch  did  not  take  any  daughter  of  Lexington  to  Cali- 
fornia. Now,  will  the  prominent  and  active  supporters  of  Waxy's 
pedigree,  as  a  daughter  of  Lexington,  come  forward  and  in  a 
manly  way  answer  this  question  of  five  words?  "  Who  took  Waxy 
to  California?"  If  Welch,  prove  'it.  If  anybody  else,  prove  it. 
We  may  be  able  to  catch  a  few  gulls  with  chaff,  the  first  attempt, 
but  we  can't  repeat  it.  If  the  question  can  be  answered,  it  is 
well,  and  if  not,  honest  people  will  form  their  own  conclusions 
that  it  is  not  sustained  and  is  no  more  worthy  of  belief  than  the 
"Grey  Eagle  mare"  form  of  the  same  pedigree,  which  is  now 
universally  conceded  to  be  a  fiction. 

AMERICAN  ECLIPSE. — It  is  not  my  purpose  to  frighten  people 
by  overthrowing  landmarks  that  have  stood  for  years,  but  it  is 
my  purpose  to  tell  the  truth  and  expose  falsehood  in  pedigrees 


INVESTIGATION   OF   DISPUTED    PEDIGREES.  447 

wherever  I  meet  it.  As  a  satisfaction  and  guide  to  breeders  in 
the  future  it  is  important  to  know  just  how  the  early  stock  were 
bred,  although  they  may  have  belonged  to  past  generations.  A 
breeder  never  can  know  too  much  of  the  lines  in  which  he  is 
operating.  This  great  horse  was  a  good  chestnut,  with  a  star 
and  left  hind  foot  white.  He  was  stout,  with  heavy  limbs,  and 
somewhat  coarse,  and  not  of  the  best  quality,  but  possibly  better 
than  the  average  of  the  Durocs.  He  was  a  fraction  of  an  inch 
below  fifteen  two.  He  was  foaled  1814,  got  by  Duroc,  son  of  im- 
ported Diomed;  dam  Miller's  Damsel,  by  imported  Messenger; 
grandam  a  mare  by  PotSos,  imported  by  Mr.  Constable  along 
with  the  horse  Baronet,  in  1795.  This  is  just  as  far  as  we  can  go 
with  any  certainty,  and  this  leaves  the  greatest  race  horse  of  his 
day  far  short  of  being  thoroughbred.  When  Mr.  Constable 
bought  the  PotSos  mare  in  England  he  got  no  certificate  of 
pedigree,  but  he  was  told  there  she  was  out  of  a  mare  by  Gim- 
crack.  Mr.  Cadwallader  R.  Colden  was  the  best-informed  man 
of  his  day  on  the  history,  blood,  and  performances  of  the  blood- 
horse,  was  a  very  intimate  and  warm  friend  of  Mr.  Constable,  and 
he  did  everything  that  could  be  done  to  straighten  out  and  ex- 
tend this  pedigree,  but  he  utterly  failed.  He  thought  it  proba- 
ble that  the  mare  was  thoroughbred,  but  he  believed  the  Gim- 
crack  cross  was  a  fiction.  Some  eighteen  or  twenty  years  ago, 
when  in  London,  Mr.  Tattersall  suggested  to  me  that  if  Lord 
Grosvenor  bred  a  filly  by  Pot8os  in  1792  that  was  thoroughbred, 
there  could  hardly  be  a  doubt  that  she  was  entered  in  some  of 
the  stakes  for  three-year-olds.  Then  and  there  we  searched  the 
old  records,  but  nothing  could  be  found  to  support  the  supposed 
pedigree.  It  was  not  till  1832  that  any  special  effort  was  made 
to  establish  the  pedigree  through  the  press,  and  in  January  of 
that  year  the  famous  Patrick  Nesbit  Edgar,  of  North  Carolina, 
wrote  as  follows  to  Mr.  Skinner,  editor  of  the  American  lurf 
Register : 

"The  authority  I  had  for  sending  the  remote  pedigree  of  American  Elipse 
for  publication  was  that  it  was  furnished  me  lately  by  a  gentleman  in  Eng- 
land, who  put  himself  to  uncommon  pains  to  procure  it.  He  resides  near 
Bath,  in  that  country.  All  the  authority  requisite  I  have  at  this  time  in  my 
possession.  The  PotSos  mare  was  got  by  PotSos;  her  dam,  foaled  in  1778,  by 
Gimcrack,  out  of  Snap-Dragon,  sister  to  Angelica  by  Snap.  (See  English  Stud 
Book.)" 

Mr.  Edgar   wrote   more   on   the   same   subject,   after   he    was 


448  THE   HORSE   OF   AMEEICA. 

pressed  to  it  by  Mr.  Golden,  hut  he  failed  to  produce  any  evi- 
dence whatever  that  he  was  telling  the  truth.  According  to  his 
representations  his  correspondence  on  the  subject  had  been  very 
extensive,  and  he  complained  that  he  had  paid  out  forty  shillings 
in  postage. 

It  will  be  observed  how  cleverly  Mr.  Edgar  conceals  the  sources 
of  his  information  while  he  pretends  to  give  them,  and  that  has 
been  the  favorite  i 'dodge"  of  all  rascally  "pedigree  makers" 
from  that  day  till  the  present.  Mr.  Constable  always  insisted 
that  the  mare  was  bred  by  Lord  Grosvenor,  and  that  she  was  by 
PotSos,  but  he  did  not  insist  that  she  was  out  of  a  mare  by  Gim- 
crack.  As  Lord  Grosvenor  was  one  of  the  most  prominent  of 
all  breeders  of  race  horses  in  his  day,  and  as  he  evidently  kept 
the  records  of  his  stud  with  more  care  than  most  of  his  contem- 
poraries, we  might  reasonably  expect  to  find  some  trace  of  this 
mare  if  she  was  thoroughbred.  After  a  careful  and  diligent 
search  of  all  the  records  of  that  period,  it  is  found  that  Lord 
Grosvenor  never  bred  a  Gimcrack  filly  to  PotSos.  This  disposes 
of  Mr.  Edgar's  humbug  story,  and  when  we  state  the  pedigree  of 
American  Eclipse  we  can  simply  say  he  was  got  by  Duroc;  dam 
Miller's  Damsel  by  Messenger,  and  grandam  the  imported  PotSos 
mare,  and  there  we  must  stop. 

For  years  past  I  have  observed  that  the  less  a  man  knows  about 
horse  history  and  horse  achievements,  the  more  importance  he 
attaches  to  the  word  "thoroughbred  ;"  and  of  all  the  millions 
and  millions  of  lies  that  have  been  told  about  pedigrees 
nine-tenths  have  been  concocted  and  circulated  for  the  one 
purpose  of  enhancing  the  supposed  value  of  the  animal  by  claim- 
ing "thoroughbred"  blood.  The  "instinct"  to  lie  about  pedi- 
grees, so  common  among  certain  classes  of  horsemen,  seems  to 
be  "the  sum  of  inherited  habits"  that  has  come  down  from  gen- 
eration to  generation.  If  you  ask  one  of  these  mendacious  gen- 
tlemen whether  American  Eclipse  was  a  thoroughbred  he  will 
answer,  with  a  strong  marked  expression  of  contempb  and  pity 
for  your  ignorance  on  his  countenance,  "Certainly  he  was  thor- 
oughbred." If  you  then  ask  him  about  his  pedigree  he  will  answer, 
"I  don't  know  anything  about  his  pedigree."  Then  you  ven- 
ture to  ask  how  he  knows  he  was  thoroughbred  if  he  does  not 
know  anything  about  his  pedigree,  and  he  will  squelch  you  com- 
pletely by  saying,  "No  horse  not  thoroughbred  could  ever  have 
done  what  American  Eclipse  did."  Here  we  get  at  the  real  basis 


INVESTIGATION   OF   DISPUTED    PEDIGREES.  449 

of  the  universal  mendacity  on  this  subject.  The  preacher  wrote 
a  great  book  called  "The  Perfect  Horse"  in  which  he  maintained 
that  the  Morgan  Horse  was  thoroughbred.  The  lawyer  wrote 
another  great  book  on  "The  American  Roadster"  in  which  he 
maintained  that  Dexter  was  a  thoroughbred.  With  two  gentle- 
men of  intelligence  and  education  writing  such  miserable  stuff, 
what  are  we  to  expect  from  the  masses? 

Now  here  is  the  horse  American  Eclipse,  the  greatest  horse  of 
his  day  in  his  racing  achievements,  that  in  his  blood  is  very  far 
from  being  "thoroughbred,"  under  any  rule  that  has  ever  been 
suggested  or  devised.  Now,  with  this  taint  on  his  escutcheon, 
it  follows  that  no  one  of  his  descendants  for  at  least  five  genera- 
tions can  be  classed  as  thoroughbred.  As  a  progenitor,  Eclipse 
cannot  be  considered  a  great  horse,  either  in  his  immediate  or 
more  remote  descendants.  Medoc  was  about  his  best,  and  he  was 
better  than  his  sire.  Another  son,  called  Monmouth  Eclipse,  was 
grandly  bred  on  the  side  of  his  dam,  was  sold,  it  was  said,  for 
fifteen  thousand  dollars  for  stock  purposes,  and  proved  a  most 
lamentable  failure,  never  having  got  a  colt  that  was  worth  fifteen 
dollars  as  a  race  horse.  The  great  fame  of  American  Eclipse, 
therefore,  rested  upon  what  were  then  designated  as  "his  mighty 
achievements  upon  the  turf."  A  reasonably  complete  history  of 
this  horse  may  be  found  in  Wallace's  Monthly  for  March,  1877, 
p.  160.  His  great  race  against  Henry,  in  which  he  represented 
the  North  as  against  the  South,  was  doubtless  the  most  memora- 
ble turf  event  that  ever  took  place  on  this  continent,  and  a  very 
brilliant  description  of  it  will  be  found  at  the  reference  given 
above.  This  race  of  four-mile  heats  took  place  on  the  Union 
Course,  Long  Island,  May,  1823,  for  twenty  thousand  dollars  a 
side,  and  it  was,  in  effect,  Eclipse  against  the  world.  Eclipse, 
fit  or  not  fit,  must  start,  while  his  opponents  had  several  prepared 
to  start  against  him  and  all  they  had  to  determine  was  to  select 
the  fastest  and  best  of  the  whole  party.  At  the  last  hour  Henry 
was  chosen  as  the  champion  of  the  South,  and  he  won  the  first 
heat  by  about  a  length  in  7:37|.  A  change  was  made  in  the 
rider  of  Eclipse  and  he  won  the  second  heat  by  about  two  lengths 
in  7:49.  In  the  third  heat  the  instructions  to  the  rider  of  Henry 
were  not  to  hurry  the  gait,  but  to  trail  to  near  the  finish  and 
then  pull  out  and  win  in  a  rush.  The  rider  of  Eclipse  under- 
stood the  tactics  of  the  enemy  and  he  hurried  the  pace  every  step 
of  the  way,  in  order  to  tire  out  his  younger  opponent.  When 


450  THE    HOESE    OF    AMERICA. 

near  the  finish  Henry  made  his  dash  and  covered  Eclipse's 
quarter  with  his  head,  but  he  could  get  no  further  and  abandoned 
the  contest.  Eclipse  had  been  punished  unmercifully  from  start 
to  finish,  and  the  time  of  the  heat  was  8:24.  This  shows  an 
average  rate  of  speed  in  the  third  heat  of  two  minutes  and  six 
seconds  to  the  mile,  a  rate  which  half  a  dozen  trotters  and  a 
round  dozen  of  pacers  have  beaten  for  a  single  mile.  It  shows 
also  the  cruelty,  to  say  nothing  of  the  absurdity,  of  heat  racing 
at  the  distance  of  four  miles.  Still  American  Eclipse  was  the 
greatest  running  horse  of  his  generation. 

BOSTON  was  a  chestnut  horse,  foaled  1833,  and  bred  by  Mr.  John 
Wickham,  the  very  eminent  jurist,  of  Richmond,  Virginia.  He 
succeeded  to  the  great  fame  of  American  Eclipse,  and  although 
about  two  generations,  in  a  racing  sense,  after  him  there  was  no 
horse  between  them  that  was  the  equal  of  either  of  them.  He 
was  a  terror  to  all  competitors  whether  of  the  North  or  the  South. 
But  it  is  only  my  purpose  here  to  put  on  record  the  real  facts 
about  his  pedigree  and  to  expose  a  glaring  fraud  that  has  been 
propagated  concerning  his  breeding  for  many  years.  Mr.  Wick- 
ham,  the  breeder  of  Boston,  bought  a  mare  by  imported  Alder- 
man (1802  or  1803)  from  John  Randolph,  of  Tuckahoe  (not 
"Roanoke"  as  sometimes  stated).  This  mare  was  out  of  a  mare 
by  imported  Clockfast,  and  here,  to  sum  it  up  and  give  Mr. 
Wickham's  exact  language,  as  he  wrote  in  1827:  "This  mare,  a 
dark  bay,  foaled  about  1799,  was  got  by  Alderman,  her  dam  by 
Clockfast,  out  of  a  mare  said  to  be  full-blooded,  of  the  Wildair 
blood."  This  Alderman  mare  he  bred  to  Florizel,  and  she  pro- 
duced the  race  horse  Tuckahoe,  and  a  filly  that  was  bred  to 
Timoleon  and  produced  Boston.  Then  Boston's  pedigree  stands; 
G-ot  by  Timoleon;  dam  by  Florizel;  grandam  by  imported  Alder- 
man; great-grandam  by  imported  Clockfast;  great-great-grandam 
"said  to  be  of  the  Wildair  blood."  This  is  down  to  "hard  pan," 
and  there  is  no  authority  in  the  wide  world  to  add  anything  to  it. 
If  we  admit  the  Wildair  mare  to  be  genuine  and  authentic  we 
are  still  one  degree  short  of  the  thoroughbred  standard.  The 
six  additional  crosses  that  have  been  added  to  this  pedigree  are 
entirely  fictitious.  They  were  copied  from  the  advertisement  of 
a  stallion  descended  from  this  maternal  line,  that  had  neither 
indorsement  nor  name  attached  to  it.  This  was  seized  upon  by 
the  late  Benjamin  Bruce,  and  boasted  of  as  a  "discovery"  of  the 
extension  of  Boston's  pedigree.  After  the  appearance  of  this 


INVESTIGATION   OF   DISPUTED    PEDIGREES.  451 

advertisement  Mr.  Wickham  prepared  and  published  a  full  list  of 
his  stock,  with  their  pedigrees,  from  the  first  of  his  breeding  oper- 
ations, and  when  he  reached  the  Wildair  mare  he  stopped,  just  as 
I  have  stopped  at  that  point.  Here  we  have  the  two  authorities 
— Mr.  John  Wickham,  distinguished  for  his  eminent  character  as 
a  man  and  a  jurist;  or  a  nameless  stallion  advertisement  without 
any  shadow  of  truth  or  responsibility. 

Timoleon,  the  sire  of  Boston,  was  one  of  the  most  distinguished 
sons  of  the  great  Sir  Archy,  his  dam  was  by  imported  Saltram,  and 
his  grandam  by  Wildair,  but  beyond  that  the  pedigree  is  a  hopeless 
muddle,  embracing  some  features  that  are  absolutely  impossible. 

TOM  BOWLING  AND  AARON  PENNINGTON. — The  first  of  these 
horses  was  by  Lexington,  the  second  was  by  Tipperary,  son  of 
Ringgold,  and  they  were  both  out  of  Lucy  Fowler,  by  imported 
Albion,  grandam  by  imported  Leviathan,  great-grandam  by  Top 
Gallant,  great-great-grandam  Eli  Odom's  saddle  mare,  which 
means,  in  that  country,  she  was  a  pacer.  Tom  Bowling  was 
probably  the  best  race  horse  of  his  year,  and  Pennington  may  be 
classed  as  mediocre,  but  as  the  latter  is  credited  with  some  pacers 
or  trotters  that  have  come  within  the  2:30  list,  his  pedigree  be- 
comes of  interest  on  this  account.  I  will,  therefore,  give  the 
facts  in  some  detail,  which  go  to  show  the  truth  about  what  the 
pedigree  contains  and  what  it  does  not  contain. 

In  1809  the  late  William  R.  Elliston,  of  Nashville,  Tennessee, 
furnished  me  the  following  facts,  which  he  obtained  personally 
from  Mr.  Eli  Odom.  It  was  very  fortunate  that  Mr.  Elliston  ob- 
tained these  facts  when  he  did,  for  Mr.  Odom  was  advanced  in  years 
and  died  not  long  afterward.  He  was  a  brother-in-law  of  the 
once  very  famous  breeder  and  race  horse  man,  Colonel  Elliott,  of 
Tennessee,  and  in  early  life  had  charge  of  his  establishment  and 
knew  more  about  Colonel  Elliott's  stock  than  he  did  himself. 
He  lived  to  old  age,  highly  respected  by  all  who  knew  him,  and 
was  a.  rn;m  of  truth.  He  kept  for  his  own  use  a  pacing  saddle 
mare  who^c  blood  he  knew  nothing  about,  and  he  bred  her  to  Top 
Gallant,  sou  of  Gallatin,  and  the  produce  was  a  filly.  This  filly 
he  bred  to  imported  Leviathan,  and  in  due  time  there  came  an- 
other filly  which  he  bred  to  imported  Albion,  and  the  next  filly 
was  Lucy  Fowler.  This  filly  passed  through  the  hands  of  a  Mr. 
Fowler  and  perhaps  one  or  two  others,  and  at  last  became  the 
property  of  Price  McGrath,  of  Lexington,  Kentucky,  and  was  the 
dam  of  Tom  Bowling,  Aaron  Pennington  and  others.  Starting 


452  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

in  with  the  pacing  mare,  Mr.  Odom  bred  all  that  followed  until 
we  reach  Lucy  Fowler,  and  there  we  find  she  had  seven  parts  of 
running  blood  and  one  part  of  pacing  blood.  While  an  animal 
bred  in  this  way  is  certainly  not  ''thoroughbred/7  nobody  can 
deny  that  he  is  "running-bred/7  for  there  are  hundreds  of  in- 
stances on  record  where  animals  of  even  shorter  pedigrees  than 
Tom  Bowling  have  been  noted  race  horses.  But  there  is  an- 
other fact  connected  with  this  family  that  is  very  interesting. 
When  the  running  qualities  of  Pennington  were  exhausted, 
McGrath  presented  him  to  a  kinsman  of  his,  somewhere  in  Western 
Missouri.  After  awhile  I  began  to  hear  of  an  occasional  trotter 
from  this  horse  and  I  wrote  his  owner  (whose  name  I  cannot  now 
recall),  and  he  replied  that  "he  went  all  the  saddle  gaits  and  was 
a  pacer."  Here  was  a  tidbit  that  I  thought  well  worth  looking 
after,  and  I  wrote  the  owner  again  for  specific  information  of  the 
character  of  his  pace  and  whether  it  was  a  clean  and  pronounced 
side  action,  but  for  some  reason  or  other  I  never  was  able  to  get. 
a  reply  to  my  questions.  There  can  be  no  mistake  about  his 
going  the  "saddle  gaits/7  but  whether  this  was  the  result  of 
training  or  whether  he  took  to  them  naturally  as  inherited  from 
Mr.  Odom7s  old  pacing  mare,  is  a  point  about  which  I  have  never 
been  fully  satisfied. 

GREY  EAGLE  (CHENERY7s). — When  Mr.  Winthrop  W.  Chenery, 
of  Boston,  bought  this  horse,  about  1866,  he  got  with  him  the 
following  pedigree. 

"  Got  by  Grey  Eagle;  dam  by  imp.  Trustee;  g.d.  by  Columbus;  g.g.d.  by 
Stockholder;  g.g.g.d.  by  Pacolet.  Bred  in  Kentucky,  and  passed  through 
many  vicissitudes,  both  as  a  runner  and  a  trotter,  beating  his  competitors  at 
both  gaits;  owned  for  a  time  in  Ohio,  now  the  property  of  Winthrop  W. 
Chenery  &  Co.,  Boston." 

This  was  a  correct  type  of  the  pedigrees  of  that  time,  lacking 
date,  location,  breeder  and  all  other  things  necessary  to  trace  and 
determine  its  value.  The  horse  had  certainly  trotted  in  2:31, 
and  he  had  trotted  two  miles  to  wagon  in  5:09£,  and  to  this  evi- 
dence of  his  trotting  ability  it  was  claimed  that  he  had  run  and  won 
many  races  at  all  distances.  This  was  such  a  combination  of  abil- 
ities as  I  never  had  heard  of  before,  and  in  attempting  to  solve  the 
riddle  I  became  deeply  interested.  The  search  then  instituted 
has  been  kept  up  over  since,  and  I  must  say  that  after  all  these 
years  I  know  absolutely  nothing  about  the  breeding  of  this 
horse.  His  first  known  owner  was  a  petty  gambler  and  general. 


INVESTIGATION   OF   DISPUTED    PEDIGREES.  453 

^outlaw  in  the  neighborhood  of  Portsmouth,  Ohio,  and  the  story 
he  told  will  be  found  in  Wallace's  Monthly,  Vol.  I.,  p.  53,  and  Vol. 
VII.,  p.  597,  besides  other  references.  The  search  has  been  so 
barren  that  I  have  not  even  the  shadow  of  a  theory  as  to  what 
his  blood  may  have  been.  He  got  two  or  three  trotters  and  one 
or  two  pacers,  I  think,  and  here  we  have  to  leave  him  as  the  most 
completely  unknown  horse  in  all  my  experience. 

GEORGE  WILKES. — It  is 'a  grievous  misfortune  that  the  pedi- 
gree of  this  great  progenitor  should  be  in  doubt.  The  misfor- 
tune is  not  in  the  fact  that  his  descendants  lose  the  supposed 
Clay  cross  in  his  dam,  for  that  was  not  of  very  great  value,  but 
in  the  fact  that  we  should  not  know  just  what  belongs  in  its  place. 
In  December,  1877,  I  had  the  good  fortune  to  meet  with  Mr. 
Harry  Felter  and  Mr.  William  L.  Simmons  at  a  breeders'  banquet, 
.and  it  was  not  long  until  we  were  in  conversation  about  the  blood 
of  the  dam  of  George  Wilkes.  I  knew  that  the  breeding  of  that 
horse  had  never  been  established,  but  I  was  greatly  surprised 
ihat  these  two  gentlemen — one  the  breeder  and  the  other  the 
owner  of  Wilkes — had  never  made  any  effort  to  trace  and  estab- 
lish so  important  a  fact.  Mr.  Felter  stated  that  he  had  bought 
the  mare  from  Mr.  W.  A.  Delevan,  and  that  Mr.  Delevan  had 
bought  her  from  Mr.  Joseph  S.  Lewis,  of  Geneva,  New  York. 
Thereupon  I  wrote  to  Mr.  Lewis  and  the  following  is  his  re- 
sponse: 

"Some  twenty-six  years  since  I  bought  a  brown  mare  from  a  gentleman  by 
the  name  of  James  Gilbert,  then  living  in  the  town  of  Phelps,  in  this  county, 
for  a  friend,  and  very  soon  after  sold  her  to  W.  A.  Delevan,  of  New  York. 
She  was  then  about  five  years  old,  a  fine  roadster,  and  could  speed  in  about 
3:30.  He  took  her  to  New  York,  and  after  driving  her  some  time  sold  her  to 
my  esteemed  friend,  Harry  Felter.  I  think  she  passed  into  the  hands  of  his 
father,  and  met  with  an  accident.  She  was  put  to  breeding,  and  had  a  colt  by 
Rysdyk's  Hambletonian,  that  grew  up  to  be  the  famous  George  Wilkes.  For 
the  benefit  of  many  persons  in  New  York  I  lost  no  time  in  looking  about  to 
learn  the  pedigree  of  the  mare  and  of  the  horse  that  got  her.  On  seeing  Gil- 
bert I  learned  that  he  got  the  mare  of  an  old  man  who  is  now  dead,  by  the 
name  of  Josiah  Philips,  of  Bristol,  in  this  county.  I  lost  no  time  in  sending 
a  man,  who  lived  with  us  at  the  time,  by  the  name  of  John  S.  Dey,  to  Bristol, 
to  get  all  the  facts  in  the  mare's  pedigree  that  he  could  get  hold  of.  He  learned 
through  Philips  that  the  father  of  this  mare  was  the  old  Wadsworth  Henry 
Clay,  owned  for  many  years  by  General  Wadsworth,  of  Genesee.  There  is 
no  mistake  about  this,  as  I  have  since  learned  from  his  neighbors  that  she  was 
a  Clay  colt.  Philips  further  stated  that  the  mother  of  the  mare  was  got  by  a 
horse  called  Highlander,  a  good  horse,  and  owned  in  that  section  of  country. 


454  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

T  have  no  doubt  about  this,  as  there  was  such  a  horse  in  that  section  about 
that  time.  When  I  go  to  Buffalo,  where  Gilbert  now  lives,  I  may  be  able  to- 
get  at  more  facts  in  regard  to  your  inquiry,  and  if  I  can  get  hold  of  anything 
that  will  give  more  light  on  the  subject  before  I  am  down  in  New  York,  I  will 
drop  into  your  office  to  see  you.  Very  truly  yours,  etc. 

"  J.  S.  LEWIS." 

The  receipt  of  this  letter,  so  straightforward  and  clean-cut  in 
its  statements,  developed  a  mystery  that  was  incomprehensible 
to  me.  Dates,  names,  places,  circumstances,  all  stand  out  as  evi- 
dences of  the  truth  of  the  representations,  and  also  as  evidences, 
that  Mr.  Lewis  had  fully  investigated  the  matter,  and  given  the 
results  of  his  investigations  to  his  friends  in  this  city;  still,  those 
friends  had  never  heard  the  facts,  or  had  entirely  forgotten  them. 
As  there  was  a  strong  prejudice  against  Clay  blood  in  certain 
quarters,  it  occurred  to  me  that  possibly  that  cross  had  been  left 
in  abeyance  so  long  that  it  really  had  been  forgotten.  This  did 
not  clear  up  the  mystery,  however,  and  I  determined  to  have  the 
whole  matter  investigated  from  a  different  starting  point.  I 
submitted  the  matter  to  Mr.  John  P.  Eay,  a  very  capable  and 
very  honest  man,  and  he  kindly  and  without  reward  undertook 
the  investigation.  The  Philips  family  lived  in  the  vicinity  of 
Bristol,  and  the  first  of  the  family  met  by  Mr.  Ray  was  Mr.  E.  V. 
Philips,  nephew  and  adopted  son  of  Joshua  Philips  (not  Josiah, 
as  Mr.  Lewis  had  it),  and  he  enumerated  several  head  of  Clays 
that  had  been  owned  by  his  uncle  Joshua,  among  them  a  mare 
that  was  bred  by  Mr.  Clark  Philips,  bought  of  him  when  a  year- 
ling by  E.  V.  Philips,  sold  as  a  four-year-old  to  his  uncle  Joshua,, 
and  by  him  the  next  year  to  "some  man  from  the  eastern  part 
of  the  country."  He  next  met  Mr.  Clark  Philips,  who  fully 
confirmed  E.  V.  Philips  about  the  Clay  filly  already  referred  to- 
and  said  she  was  got  when  old  Henry  Clay  was  owned  by  Kent 
and  Bailey  of  Bristol,  and  that  her  dam  was  "Old  Telegraph"  by 
Highlander,  etc.  In  his  original  report  to  me  of  his  investiga- 
tion Mr.  Eay  uses  the  following  language: 

"  When  Henry  Clay  was  being  brou  ht  from  the  East  to  his  home  in  West- 
ern New  York,  he  stopped  one  night  at  the  hotel  then  kept  in  Bristol  by  Dr. 
Durgan,  deceased  (the  breeder  of  Castle  Boy),  and  made  a  season  at  this  place 
the  following  year,  when  he  became  the  property  of  Kent  &  Bailey.  He  wa& 
kept  in  that  town  for  several  years,  etc." 

Now,  as  between  the  original  and  voluntary  statement  of  Cap- 
tain Lewis  and  the  investigation  carried  through  by  Mr.  Eay,. 


INVESTIGATION   OF   DISPUTED   PEDIGREES.  455 

there  is  no  conflict  and  all  is  smooth  sailing,  and  upon  the  infor- 
mation derived  from  these  two  sources  the  pedigree  of  George 
Wilkes  was  decided  as  established  by  the  Board  of  Censors.  But 
more  recent  discoveries  made  by  Mr.  Ray,  in  which  I  have  no 
doubt  he  is  thoroughly  conscientious  and  possibly  thoroughly 
right,  have  raised  a  conflict  that  is  irrepressible,  for  dates  are 
involved  and  insisted  upon  that  make  the  pedigree  impossible. 
In  his  original  statement  Mr.  Ray  says  that  Henry  -Clay  made 
the  season  of  1846  at  Bristol,  "when  he  became  the  property  of 
Kent  &  Bailey.  He  was  kept  in  that  town  for  some  years." 
Up  to  this  point  there  is  no  contradiction  and  no  impossibility; 
Ray  agrees  with  Lewis  and  Lewis  agrees  with  Ray.  But  in  the 
past  two  or  three  years  Mr.  Ray  believes  he  has  secured  addi- 
tional information,  and  this  places  Captain  Lewis  in  a  very  un- 
enviable position.  The  whole  point  of  Clark  Philips7  evidence  is 
that  he  bred  his  mare  "Old  Telegraph"  to  Henry  Clay  when  that 
horse  was  owned  by  Bailey  Brothers,  of  Bristol,  and  I  suppose 
they  were  the  successors  of  Kent  &  Bailey  of  an  earlier  date. 
Now,  as  Mr.  Ray  told  us  in  his  first  investigation  that  Henry  Clay 
passed  into  the  hands  of  Kent  &  Bailey  in  1847,  and  as  he  tells 
us  later  that  he  did  not  pass  into  their  hands  till  nine  or  ten 
years  after  that  date  and  then  fails  to  fix  the  precise  year,  it  must 
be  conceded  by  all  that  his  information  is  not  wholly  satisfactory. 
Recollections  may  be  ever  so  honest,  but  they  are  of  various 
degrees  of  reliability.  The  best  and  final  evidence  is  the  service 
book  of  the  horse.  My  best  judgment  of  the  whole  matter  is 
that  Mr.  Ray's  later  information  is  probably  correct,  but  until 
all  doubt  is  removed  by  the  production  of  some  contemporaneous 
record  covering  the  case  there  must  remain  an  element  of  uncer- 
tainty attaching  to  the  pedigree. 


CHAPTER  XXXI. 

HOW   THE   TROTTING   HOESE   IS   BRED. 

Early  trotting  and  pacing  races — Strains  of  blood  in  the  first  known  trotters 
— The  lesson  of  Maud  S. — The  genesis  of  trotting-horse  literature — The 
simple  study  of  inheritance — The  different  forms  of  heredity — The  famous 
quagga  story  not  sustained — Illustrations  in  dogs — Heredity  of  acquired 
characters  and  instincts — Development  of  successive  generations  necessary 
— Unequaled  collections  of  statistics — Acquired  injuries  and  unsoundnes* 
transmitted. 

As  preparatory  to  taking  up  the  consideration  of  the  breeding 
problem,  it  may  be  well  to  look  back  a  little  and  see  what  had 
transpired  in  the  trotting-horse  world,  leading  up  to  the  serious 
consideration  of  how  he  was  bred.  It  has  been  generally  ac- 
cepted as  true  that  there  were  no  trotting  contests  in  this  coun- 
try till  about  the  second  decade  of  the  present  century,  but  this 
impression  has  grown  out  of  the  fact  that  the  newspapers,  down 
to  that  period,  failed  to  report  such  contests.  It  is  historically 
true  that  pacing  races  were  a  common  amusement  among  the 
people  of  different  portions  of  the  colonies  nearly  two  hundred 
years  ago.  This  is  established  by  the  legislative  action  of  some 
of  the  colonies,  in  the  first  half  of  the  last  century,  in  suppress- 
ing all  "pacing  and  trotting  races."  It  is  well  to  note,  in  pass- 
ing, that  pacers  and  trotters  of  that  early  period  were  commin- 
gled, just  as  they  are  to-day,  with  the  former  the  more  prominent, 
and  the  more  highly  prized.  Of  that  hundred  years  of  silence 
we  have  no  details  and  but  few  historical  references  that  were 
contemporaneous  with  the  events.  Hence  we  are  practically  de- 
pendent upon  the  legislative  action  of  the  colonies  to  establish 
the  truth  beyond  question. 

When  we  reach  the  period  when  the  newspapers  began  to  re- 
port some  of  the  more  conspicuous  and  important  trotting  events 
about  Philadelphia  and  New  York,  we  find  a  condition  of  things 
for  which  we  are  hardly  prepared.  The  pacer  has  lost  his  prom- 
inence and  is  but  little  in  evidence,  and  all  the  best  trotters  seem 


HOW  THE   TROTTING   HORSE   IS   BRED.  457 

to  be  descended  from  the  imported  horse  Messenger.     The  best 
performers  of  that  period  were  as  follows: 

Topgallant  Betsy  Baker  Washington 

Paul  Pry  Sir  Peter  Sally  Miller 

Dutchman  Screwdriver  Greenwich  Maid 

Jersey  Fagdown  Chancellor  Charlotte  Temple 

Commander  (Bull)  Whalebone  Confidence 

Gipsy  Lady  Suffolk  Rattler 

Bull  Calf  Andrew  Jackson  Lady  Salisbury 

Lady  Warrenton  Fanny  Pullen  Modesty 

These  were  all  descended  from  Messenger,  and  with  the  excep- 
tion of  Edwin  Forrest  and  one  or  two  others,  believed  to  be  de- 
scended from  pacing  blood,  they  were  the  leading  performers  of 
their  day.  All  of  the  above  animals  were  not  equally  strong  in 
Messenger  blood  as  threa  of  them  were  by  sons  and  out  of 
daughters  of  Messenger,  five  were  by  sons  of  Messenger,  and  all 
the  others  had  more  or  less  of  his  blood.  More  than  eighty  years 
ago  the  descendants  of  Messenger,  wherever  known,  were  recog- 
nized as  a  family  of  trotters  and  this  broad  fact  became  a  kind  of 
universal  belief  among  horsemen.  This  belief,  being  founded  on 
a  truth,  was  all  right,  but  a  plausible  deduction  from  it,  which 
was  not  a  truth,  inflicted  a  terrible  penalty  upon  the  pockets  of 
otherwise  intelligent  men  for  a  period  of  more  than  fifty  years 
before  they  discovered  their  error.  The  postulate  was  in  this 
form:  "Messenger  was  a  thoroughbred  horse  and  founded  a 
great  family  of  trotters,  hence,  any  other  thoroughbred  horse, 
under  the  same  conditions,  would  have  accomplished  the  same 
results."  This  "stock"  form  of  the  argument  was  plausible  and  it 
was  in  everybody's  mouth  from  one  end  of  the  land  to  the  other. 
Every  stable  boy,  every  breeder,  every  editor  believed  the  deduc- 
tion was  sound,  and,  I  may  as  well  own  it,  I  believed  it  myself 
until  I  had  gathered  together  all  the  accessible  trotting  statistics 
of  this  country  and  reduced  them  to  order  and  method,  so  that 
they  might  be  studied  and  their  true  teachings  be  drawn  from 
them.  As  an  illustration  of  the  ignorant  intolerance  and  dis  • 
honesty  with  which  certain  editors  and  their  followers  main- 
tained, less  than  twenty  years  ago,  that  all  that  was  of  any  value 
in  the  trotter  was  inherited  from  the  runner,  take  the  following: 
In  the  autumn  of  1878  the  famous  Maud  S.,  then  four  years 
old,  came  out  and  trotted  a  mile  in  2:17i,  which  was  then  a 
world's  wonder.  She  was  a  pacer  of  the  plastic  type,  but  she 


458  THE   HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

had  to  wear  toe-weights  through  all  her  brilliant  career  to  keep 
her  on  her  gait  as  a  trotter.  Everybody  was  astounded  at  this 
phenomenal  performance  and  went  wild  over  it  as  something 
that  had  never  been  done  before,  by  a  four-year-old,  and  proba- 
bly never  would  be  done  again.  On  this  performance  I  simply 
remarked,  in  the  Monthly: 

"Her  trotting  inheritance  is  very  strong  and  well  defined  on  both  sides  of 
the  house,  and  she  has  a  right  to  trot,  and  trot  fast,  and  her  2:17£  shows  that 
she  trots  instinctively,  and  without  much  training;  and  in  this  she  is  phenome- 
nal. She  is  simply  a  little  in  advance  of  her  time;  for  no  truth  is  more  fully 
sustained  by  analogy  and  reason  than  that,  in  a  few  generation  of  judicious 
selections,  such  mares  will  not  be  phenomenal." 

From  this  four-year-old  record  of  2:17|  in  1878,  we  pass  on  to 
the  two-year-old  record  of  2:10f  in  1891.  A  four-year-old  now 
trotting  in  2:17|  is  only  commonplace.  It  was  not  a  gift  of 
"prophecy"  nor  an  overwrought  enthusiasm,  therefore,  that 
enabled  me  to  determine  that  2:17-^  for  a  four-year-old  would 
become  commonplace,  but  a  study  of  the  laws  of  breeding  in  the 
light  of  all  past  trotting  experiences.  When  this  performance 
was  made  the  late  B.  G.  Bruce,  of  Lexington,  Kentucky,  then 
editor  of  a  sporting  paper,  went  into  ecstasies  over  it  and  was  at 
once  able  to  show,  to  his  own  mind,  that  it  was  all  owing  to  the 
running  blood  in  Maud  S.  that  enabled  her  to  show  phenomenal 
speed.  He  figured  this  all  out  and  showed  that  she  possessed 
eleven-sixteenths  of  what  he  called  "pure  blood,"  to  five-six- 
teenths of  what  he  called  "cold  blood."  In  winding  up  his 
article,  he  says: 

"In  conclusion  we  deem  it  evident  from  her  form  and  action  that  the  great 
power  of  Maud  S.  comes  from  her  pure  blood;  that  her  breeding  back  on  the 
form  and  action,  courage  and  endurance  of  the  blood  horse  is  the  very  reason 
why  she  is  so  superior  to  all  four-year-olds  that  have  ever  appeared.  And  an- 
other point  is  obvious:  the  pure  blood  matures  so  much  earlier  than  the  cold 
blood  that  years  are  gained  in  development  over  the  cold-blooded  trotter." 

Now  instead  of  Maud  S.  possessing  eleven-sixteenths  of  "pure 
blood,"  as  claimed  by  Mr.  Bruce,  it  has  never  been  shown  and 
never  can  be  shown  that  she  possessed  one  single  drop  of  "pure 
blood."  When  Sally  Russell,  the  grandam  of  Maud  S.,  was  sold 
to  Mr.  E.  A.  Alexander,  she  was  sold  under  a  fraudulent  pedi- 
gree, and  when  Pilot  Jr.  was  sold  to  Mr.  Alexander  an  utterly 
impossible  pedigree  was  manufactured  for  him.  In  both  cases 
he  was  the  victim  of  sharpers,  for  in  his  life  and  character  he 


HOW   THE   TROTTING    HORSE    IS    BRED.  459 

stood  away  above  all  suspicion.  The  pedigrees  of  Pilot  Jr.  and 
Sally  Russell  have  been  fully  considered  in  Chapter  XXIX.  of  this 
volume. 

After  publishing  "The  American  Stud  Book"  in  1867,  and  the 
first  volume  of  the  "Trotting  Register"  in  1871,  and  having  care- 
fully compiled  all  past  trotting  races  and  trotting  experiences, 
up  to  the  close  of  1872,  it  began  to  dawn  upon  me  that  possi- 
bly I  had  been  handling  a  great  many  fictions  and  thereby  given 
them  an  indorsement  to  the  world  as  truths.  This  "gave  me 
pause,"  as  well  as  many  a  sleepless  night  and  anxious  day.  The 
old  adage,  "What  everybody  says  must  be  true,"  gave  me  no  com- 
fort, for  I  had  just  found  that  Mr.  "Everybody"  was  a  great  liar. 
Then  a  higher  and  purer  maxim  suggested  itself  to  my  mind, 
"One,  with  the  truth  on  his  side,  is  a  majority,"  and  under  this 
banner  I  enlisted  for  the  war  which  I  knew  was  coming.  Having 
compiled  the  pedigrees  of  all  running  horses  and  all  trotting 
horses,  so  far  as  known,  up  to  1870,  and  more  especially  having 
gathered  up  all  past  trotting  experiences  and  statistics,  I  felt 
that  I  was  equipped  to  enter  the  lists  with  everybody  against  me. 
I  knew  I  was  liable  to  meet  antagonists  on  every  side,  and  some 
of  them  of  great  ability,  but  at  the  same  time  I  knew  they  had 
neither  the  armor  of  truth  nor  the  weapons  of  facts  at  their  com- 
mand. Mere  prejudices  and  the  limping  opinions  that  spring 
from  them  have  no  force  in  an  earnest  combat.  The  platform 
upon  which  I  stood  was  aggressive,  but  simple  and  easily  compre- 
hended, viz.,  "The  English  horse  Messenger,  in  his  own  right 
and  by  his  own  power,  founded  a  family  of  trotters — something 
which  no  other  English  horse  had  ever  been  able  to  take  the  first 
step  toward  accomplishing."  This  was  the  central  point  around 
which  the  battle  raged,  and  to  it  I  added  the  pacer  as  a  subsidiary 
or  minor  source  of  speed,  equally  certain  in  fact,  but  not  equally 
well  defined  in  lines  of  descent,  nor  equally  important  in  num- 
bers and  value.  From  these  major  and  minor  sources  it  is  liter- 
ally true  that  all  our  trotters  have  descended.  In  confirmation 
of  this,  a  very  capable  and  careful  writer  in  the  New  York  Sun, 
within  the  past  few  months,  has  said:  "Hambletonian  is  the  pro- 
genitor of  ninety  per  cent,  of  the  fast  trotters  now  on  the  turf." 
When  we  start  with  Hambletonian,  the  triple  great-grandson  of 
Messenger,  we  are  safely  within  the  period  of  records  of  both 
blood  and  performances,  and  we  are  relieved  from  some  possible 
uncertainties  in  the  earlier  period  of  Messenger  himself,  hence 


460  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

the  writer  quoted  above  is  at  bed-rock  in  the  sources  of  his  in- 
formation. This  makes  my  major  proposition  so  plain  and  so 
triumphantly  sustained  that  it  is  doubtful  whether  there  is  now 
living  an  intelligent  horseman  who  would  even  think  of  disput- 
ing it. 

In  the  spring  of  1872  I  wrote  a  series  of  articles  under  the 
caption  of  "How  shall  we  breed  the  Trotting  Horse?"  which  was- 
published  in  the  Spirit  of  the  Times  in  February  and  March 
of  that  year.  These  papers  were  revised  and  enlarged  and  pub- 
lished, as  an  introductory  treatise  on  breeding  the  trotter,  in  the 
second  volume  of  the  "American  Trotting  Register."  This 
treatise  is  the  genesis  of  all  discussions  in  which  the  laws  govern- 
ing the  breeding  of  the  trotter  are  considered.  Up  to  that  period 
contributions  to  the  press  on  breeding  subjects  were  generally 
transient  and  confined  to  the  writer's  own  experience.  If  he  was 
trying  to  breed  trotters  a  comparison  of  his  material  always 
corresponded  with  his  arguments,  and  the  only  thing  he  demon- 
strated was  his  own  inability  to  see  over  the  fence  surrounding 
his  own  paddocks.  I  love  a  man  who  loves  his  horse,  and,  as  a 
man,  I  cannot  dislike  him  because  he  thinks  his  horse  is  the  very 
acme  of  all  equine  perfection,  although  he  may  be  a  worthless 
brute;  but  when  a  man  spends  a  whole  lifetime  in  trying  to  breed 
trotters  from  blood  that  cannot  trot,  I  lose  all  respect  for  his  men- 
tal operations.  The  man  who  cannot  widen  out  and  take  profit 
from  the  demonstrated  experiences  of  the  whole  trotting  world, 
had  better  turn  his  attention  to  some  business  suited  to  his 
capacity.  Not  a  single  thought  advanced  nor  a  position  taken 
in  the  article  referred  to  has  ever  been  successfully  controverted, 
although  they  excited  much  opposition.  An  attempt  was  made 
to  laugh  the  phrase  "trotting  instinct"  out  of  court,  but  that 
little  phrase  not  only  held  the  fortress,  but  became,  as  it  were, 
the  basis  of  the  whole  system  of  thought  represented  in  the' 
treatise.  It  had  a  meaning  and  a  fitness  in  what  it  meant  that 
put  it  in  everybody's  mouth,  and  there  it  stays  for  all  time.  In- 
stinct is  "the  sum  of  inherited  habits;"  and  these  five  words  ex- 
press the  best  practical  definition  of  its  meaning  that  I  have  ever 
met  with. 

THE  LAWS  THAT  GOVERN.— In  all  animal  life  the  resemblance 
of  the  offspring  to  the  parents  is  the  universal  law.  The  law  is 
not  only  true  in  the  physical  conformation  of  the  offspring,  but 
it  is  also  true  in  the  mentality  and  instinctivity  of  the  offspring. 


HOW   THE    TROTTIXG    HORSE    IS    BRED.  461 

In  former  years  it  was  very  aptly  termed  the  law  of  inheritance, 
but  the  more  general  usage  is  now  the  law  of  heredity.  In 
casting  about  for  a  definition  of  this  newly  coined  word,  I  have 
not  been  able  to  find  anything  more  comprehensive  and  express- 
ive than  that  given  by  Ribot,  in  the  opening  sentence  of  his  work 
on  this  subject.  He  says: 

"  Heredity  is  that  biological  law  by  which  all  beings  endowed  with  life  tend 
to  repeat  themselves  in  their  descendants;  it  is  for  the  species  what  personal 
identity  is  for  the  individual.  By  it  a  groundwork  remains  unchanged  amid 
incessant  variation;  by  it  Nature  ever  copies  and  imitates  herself." 

This  has  been  the  law  ever  since  the  command  went  forth, 
"Let  the  earth  bring  forth  the  living  creature  after  his  kind, 
•cattle  and  creeping  thing  and  beast  of  the  earth  after  his  kind." 
Hence  sprang  the  varieties,  species,  genera  and  orders  into  which 
naturalists  have  sought  to  classify  the  animal  kingdom.  In  gen- 
erations long  past  our  ancestors  used  such  phrases  as  "Like 
father,  like  son,"  "Trot  father,  trot  mother,  trot  colt,"  "Like 
begets  like,"  etc.,  meaning  just  what  we  mean  to-day  by  the 
word  "heredity."  While  heredity  is  a  universal  law  of  animal 
life,  it  must  be  remembered  that  its  results  cannot  be  pre-deter- 
mined  by  any  rule  of  arithmetic.  Every  colt  has  a  sire  and  a 
dam,  four  grandparents,  eight  great-grandparents,  and  then 
sixteen,  and  next  thirty-two  progenitors.  Here  we  have  five 
generations  embracing  sixty-two  different  animals,  and  the  ex- 
periences of  many  years  have  gone  to  show  that  if  these  sixty-two 
animals  are  all  purely  bred  in  the  breed  which  you  are  seeking  to 
secure  there  is  a  reasonable  certainty  that  your  prospective  colt 
will  be  a  good  representative  of  that  breed.  By  this  I  mean  that 
with  this  number  of  generations  there  is  but  little  danger  of  your 
colt  following  some  undesirable  type  outside  of  and  beyond  these 
five  generations.  The  only  way  to  study  this  problem  intelli- 
gently and  with  satisfaction  is  to  tabulate  the  pedigrees  of  the 
two  animals  you  propose  to  couple  and  then  study  each  individual 
of  the  different  generations  and  see  what  each  one  has  done  in 
ihe  direction  you  are  breeding.  If  yon  are  breeding  for  a  Derby 
winner  you  want  every  one  of  the  sixty-two  to  have  proved  himself 
or  herself  a  first-class  runner,  and  you  don't  want  a  single  drop  of 
outside  blood  in  any  of  them.  If  you  are  breeding  for  the  two- 
minute  trotter,  you  don't  want  any  blood  but  the  fastest  trotting 
blood.  If  you  are  breeding  for  the  two-minute  pacer  you  want 


463  THE    HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

nothing  but  the  fastest  pacing  blood.  But,  possibly  you  may  be^ 
breeding  for  size,  style,  and  beauty,  and  in  that  case  you  must  be 
particularly  careful  to  have  your  tabulation  full  of  animals  pos- 
sessing these  qualifications.  In  times  past  many  breeders  have 
been  led  to  their  own  hurt  in  making  ill-considered  attempts  at 
improvement  by  mating  animals  of  antagonistic  instincts.  The 
fast  runner  and  the  fast  trotter  have  nothing  in  common  between 
them  in  the  way  of  gait.  In  physical  structure  there  may  be  no 
antagonism  that  we  can  see,  but  in  mental  or  psychical  structure 
there  is  nothing  but  what  is  inharmonious.  Each  animal  and 
each  line  of  blood  must  be  considered  as  it  stands  separate  from 
the  other,  and  the  question  must  be  not  only  asked  but  answered: 
"What  has  this  line  of  blood  done  in  its  own  right  and  by  its  own. 
power?" 

In  studying  these  tabulations  it  certainly  is  not  necessary  to 
remind  any  thinking  man  of  the  comparative  value  of  near  and 
remote  individuals.  The  first  and  second  generations  are  the 
important  factors  in  the  character  and  value  of  the  proposed  colt, 
and,  as  a  rule,  the  four  grandparents  are  not  given  that  weight 
in  making  up  a  sound  judgment  to  which  they  are  entitled.  A 
tabulated  pedigree  may  show  a  general  equality  or  average  good- 
ness all  over,  in  the  direction  we  are  looking;  although  it  may 
embrace  but  few  stars  it  is  not  a  pedigree  that  should  be  hastily 
rejected.  The  student  should  never  lose  sight  of  the  truth  that 
bad  qualities  are  just  as  certain  to  be  transmitted  as  good  ones. 
Bad  feet,  bad  limbs,  bad  eyes  and  bad  respiration  should  be 
sufficient  cause  for  prompt  rejection.  Derangement  or  unhealthi- 
ness  of  the  internal  viscera  or  any  of  them  is  just  as  likely  to  be 
transmitted  as  an  external  malformation  or  disease. 

In  some  instances  the  qualities  sought  seem  to  emanate 
entirely  from  the  sire  or  the  dam,  and  this  prepotency  seems  to 
appear  more  frequently  as  the  work  of  the  sire  than  of  the  dam, 
perhaps  because  the  opportunities  are  greater  in  the  number  of 
services.  Thousands  of  stallions  have  failed  to  get  trotters  out 
of  running-bred  mares,  but  as  many  as  you  could  count  on  the 
fingers  of  one  hand,  probably,  have  succeeded  in  a  few  instances. 
Of  these  Pilot  Jr.,  Almont  and  Electioneer  occur  to  me  at  this 
time  as  the  most  prominent.  These  horses,  so  far  as  we  know 
the  lines  of  their  blood,  were  strictly  trotting  and  pacing  bred, 
with  no  tincture  of  running  blood  in  their  veins.  On  a  certain 
occasion  Senator  Stanford  wished  to  demonstrate  to  the  writer 


HOW  THE   TROTTING    HORSE   IS   BRED.  4G3 

that  Electioneer  could  get  trotters  out  of  running-bred  mares, 
and  after  showing  the  step  of  the  famous  Palo  Alto,  he  remarked: 
"None  of  my  other  stallions  can  do  that.  Electioneer  alone  has 
the  power  to  get  trotters  out  of  some  thoroughbred  mares,  but 
not  all."  This  ability  to  get  a  trotter  out  of  a  running  mare  is 
the  highest  test  to  which  the  prepotency  of  a  trotting  sire  can  be 
put,  as  is  shown  by  the  very  small  number  that  have  ever 
succeeded. 

DIRECT  HEREDITY. — While  it  is  true  that  all  inheritance  must 
come  through  the  parents,  it  is  also  true  that  phenomena  of  form, 
character  and  quality  are  not  infrequently  presented  that  the 
parents  do  not  seem  to  possess,  and  upon  looking  further  we  find 
those  phenomena  in  some  of  the  more  remote  ancestors.  When 
we  find  the  character  of  the  offspring  a  practical  reproduction  of 
one  or  both  the  parents,  we  designate  this  as  a  case  of  "direct 
heredity"  merely  for  the  convenience  of  description  and  elucida- 
tion. Ideal  or  perfect  heredity  never  has  been  reached  and  never 
will  be.  There  are  two  sources  to  the  life  of  the  new  being,  and 
each  of  these  sources  is  made  up  of  never-ending  variations. 
There  may  seem  to  be  a  very  complete  coalescence  of  the  elements 
of  the  sire  and  dam  in  the  foal,  but  it  is  not  like  either  of  them 
and  yet  it  may  resemble  both.  A  mere  physical  resemblance  to 
a  great  sire  is  no  evidence  that  the  colt  will  be  equally  great.  I 
have  seen  many  of  the  sons  of  the  great  Hambletonian,  and  among 
them  all  the  one  that  bore  the  strongest  physical  resemblance  to 
him  was  of  the  least  value,  either  as  a  performer  or  a  progenitor. 
Hambletonian  left  many  great  sons  behind  him,  some  of  them 
even  greater  than  himself,  and  while  they  all  possessed  certain 
family  characteristics,  I  cannot  recall  a  single  one  that  strikingly 
resembled  him  in  his  physical  conformation.  From  this  inci- 
dent, as  well  as  a  thousand  other  similar  ones,  we  cannot  avoid 
the  conclusion  that  heredity  controls  the  whole  animal,  man  or 
beast,  in  his  mental  as  well  as  in  his  physical  constitution. 

CROSS  HEREDITY  is  one  of  the  forms  of  direct  heredity,  and 
is  not  very  well  exemplified  in  trotting  experiences,  nor  very 
valuable  in  the  lessons  it  is  supposed  to  teach.  In  its  first  form 
it  embraces  instances  where  the  character  of  the  sire  is  trans- 
mitted to  his  daughters  and  the  character  of  the  dam  is  trans- 
mitted to  her  sons.  Long  ago  I  established  a  table  in  the  "Year 
Book"  to  embrace  the  sires  of  mares  that  produced  two  or  more 
animals  in  the  2:30  list,  but  had  failed  to  place  any  representa- 


464  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

tive  there  from  their  own  loins.  The  development  of  this  table 
simply  showed  an  array  of  sires  that  were  not  able  to  get  2:30 
trotters,  but  when  their  daughters  were  bred  to  horses  of  stronger 
inheritance,  horses  indeed  that  were  able  to  get  trotters  from 
almost  any  kind  of  mares,  they  produced  foals  that  came  within 
the  circle.  This  was  a  grandsire's  table  and  depended  upon 
second  causes,  that  is,  the  horses  that  gave  it  life  occupied 
secondary  positions  in  it,  and  it  presented  but  little  that  was  of 
value  to  the  student  of  horse  history.  In  the  discussion  of  this 
particular  form  of  heredity  the  books  are  filled  up  with  instances 
of  vicious  fathers  begetting  vicious  daughters  and  vicious  mothers 
producing  vicious  sons,  with  more  or  less  uncertainty  as  to  the 
individual  origin  of  the  parties  in  question. 

INDIRECT  AND  COLLATERAL  HEREDITY. — When  a  child  or  a 
colt  does  not  resemble  its  parents,  but  'Hakes  after"  the  grand- 
father or  some  more  remote  ancestor,  it  is  said  to  be  a  case  of 
atavism,  or  indirect  or  collateral  heredity.  Twenty  years  ago  I 
visited,  by  appointment,  a  branch  of  my  family  at  the  old  home- 
stead of  my  great-grandfather,  on  the  maternal  side.  There 
never  had  been  any  knowledge  of  each  other  or  intercourse  be- 
tween these  two  branches  of  the  family.  On  arriving  at  my 
destination  I  was  warmly  greeted  by  a  gentleman  who  came  for- 
ward from  the  crowd  and  named  me.  As  there  were  a  good 
number  of  people  alighting  from  the  train  at  the  same  time  I 
asked  my  cousin  how  he  knew  me,  and  he  replied  that  I  bore 
such  a  striking  resemblance  to  my  grandfather  that  at  a  single 
glance  he  could  have  picked  me  out  of  a  hundred  men.  This 
grandfather  was  the  father  of  my  mother  and  he  died  when  I  was 
a  small  boy.  But  there  was  a  still  greater  surprise  awaiting  me. 
My  kinsman  was  an  intelligent  man  of  excellent  sense,  and  during 
the  few  days  I  spent  in  his  family  he  was  to  me  a  most  interest- 
ing study.  In  a  hundred  ways  he  reminded  me  of  my  brother, 
not  in  resemblance  of  face,  for  there  was,  practically,  no  resem- 
blance; but  in  the  action  of  his  mind,  in  his  way  of  putting  things, 
and  especially  in  his  unstudied  and  peculiar  gestures  of  his  hands 
in  conversation,  the  one  seemed  to  be  a  perfect  reproduction  of 
the  other.  They  were  both  born  and  reared  on  farms,  they  were 
both  heads  of  families,  and  they  were  both  elders  in  the  Presby- 
terian church.  The  one  was  the  third  and  the  other  the  fourth 
remove  from  their  common  progenitor.  I  have  read  carefully 
descriptions  of  many  cases  of  mental  heredity,  but  this  case, 


HOW   THE   TROTTING   HORSE   IS   BRED.  465 

coming  under  my  own  observation  and  deliberate  study,  seemed 
to  be  more  thoroughly  convincing  than  any  or  all  others. 

The  fact  that  certain  qualities  may  lie  dormant  through  several 
generations  and  then  be  unexpectedly  developed  was  well  known  to 
the  ancients  more  than  two  thousand  years  ago.  Plutarch  mentions 
a  Greek  woman  who  gave  birth  to  a  negro  child  and  was  brought 
to  trial  for  adultery,  but  it  was  discovered  that  she  was  descended 
in  the  fourth  degree  from  an  Ethiopian.  Montaigne  expresses 
his  astonishment  at  this,  and  remarks: 

"Is  it  not  marvelous  that  this  drop  of  seed  from  which  we  are  produced 
should  bear  the  impression,  not  only  of  the  bodily  form,  but  even  the  thoughts 
and  inclinations  of  our  fathers  ?  Where  does  this  drop  of  water  keep  its  infi- 
nite number  of  forms?  How  does  it  bear  these  likenesses  through  a  progress 
so  haphazard  and  so  irregular  that  the  great-grandson  shall  resemble  the  great- 
grandfather, the  nephew  the  uncle  ?  " 

The  most  prolific  and  satisfactory  sources  of  evidence  in  sup- 
port of  indirect  or  reversionary  heredity  are  to  be  found  in  the 
crosses  between  the  white  and  the  black  races.  They  abound  in 
all  quarters  wherever  the  two  races  are  to  be  found,  and  many  a 
proud  family  has  been  humbled  to  the  dust  when  the  long-concealed 
"black  drop"  makes  its  unexpected  appearance.  There  are  hun- 
dreds of  such  cases  in  the  world,  and  it  is  impossible  to  make  even 
an  approximation  of  the  number  of  generations  that  would  be 
required  to  wash  out  the  stain. 

HEREDITY  OF  INFLUENCE.— When  the  subject  of  "How  to  Breed 
the  Trotting  Horse"  was  in  its  infancy  there  was  a  wonderful 
amount  of  mystery  about  it.  Nobody  could  understand  why  one 
horse  of  the  same  general  conformation  should  not  trot  just  as 
fast  as  another.  When  it  was  found  that  this  way  of  looking  at 
the  problem  would  not  meet  the  facts,  one  thought  it  was  owing 
to  the  length  of  certain  bones,  another  that  it  was  all  in  the  hind 
quarters,  another  that  it  was  "the  trotting  pitch,"  another  that 
it  was  "'a  happy  nick,"  etc.  W'hen  it  was  all  made  plain  that  a 
horse  was  able  to  trot  fast  because  his  ancestors  were  able  to  trot 
fast,  the  seekers  for  the  mysterious  had  nothing  left  that  suited 
their  taste  but  the  effects  of  first  impregnations,  resting  on 
Lord  Morton's  story  of  the  quagga  and  the  mare,  which  is  here 
dignified  with  the  title  "Heredity  of  Influence."  Now,  just 
how  "influence,"  two  or  three  years  after  the  event,  should  be- 
come a  controlling  factor  in  the  paternity  of  a  colt,  is  a  mystery 
sufficiently  profound  to  satisfy  our  friends  of  earlier  years,  so 


466  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

intent  upon  finding  something  mysterious.  For  about  three- 
quarters  of  a  century  the  story,  coming  from  so  reputable  a 
source,  has  been  cited  in  many  scientific  bodies  and  accepted  by 
many  scientific  men  and  writers  without  a  question  or  doubt. 
No  writer,  so  far  as  I  know,  has  ever  attempted  to  controvert  it, 
and  if  the  facts  be  well  founded  it  demolishes  in  its  conclusions 
all  the  laws  of  generation,  to  say  nothing  of  the  universal 
law  of  heredity.  The  point  to  be  considered  is,  whether  the  first 
impregnation  influences  the  offspring  of  subsequent  and  different 
impregnations.  In  other  words,  whether  the  children  of  a  widow 
by  her  second  husband  will  partake  of  the  characteristics  of  her 
first  husband.  Ribot  says  "that  from  the  psychological  point  of 
view,  we  are  skeptical  in  regard  to  this  form  of  heredity.  The 
fact  seems  to  be  perfectly  out  of  the  order  of  things/'  He  then 
goes  on  to  consider  it  as  though  it  might  be  true,  and  cites  any 
number  of  the  veriest  fables  in  support  of  it,  without  ever  stop- 
ping to  inquire  whether  they  have  any  foundation  of  truth.  In 
every  assemblage  of  breeders  brought  together  for  the  purpose 
of  discussing  how  best  to  breed  and  rear  our  domestic  animals  at 
a  profit,  there  is  'always  somebody  to  bring  in  the  everlasting 
story  of  the  mare  and  the  quagga,  not  because  it  may  have  any 
relevancy  to  the  subject,  but  it  is  an  opportunity  not  to  be  lost 
to  show  one's  learning.  As  this  story  has  served  the  purpose  of 
showing  off  the  learning  of  so  many  thousands  who  never  saw  it, 
I  will  here  give  it  in  its  original  and  official  form.  A  communi- 
cation from  the  Earl  of  Morton  was  read  before  the  Eoyal  Society 
of  London,  November  23,  1820,  and  published  in  "Philosophical 
Transactions"  for  1821,  p.  20,  and  is  as  follows: 

"I  yesterday  had  an  opportunity  of  observing  a  singular  fact  in  natural 
history,  which  you  may,  perhaps,  deem  not  unworthy  of  being  communicated 
to  the  Royal  Society. 

"  Some  years  ago  I  was  desirous  of  trying  the  experiment  of  domesticating 
the  quagga,  and  endeavored  to  procure  some  individuals  of  that  species.  I 
obtained  a  male;  but  being  disappointed  of  a  female,  I  tried  to  breed  from  the 
male  quagga  and  a  young  chestnut  mare  of  seven-eighths  Arabian  blood,  and 
which  had  never  been  bred  from;  the  result  was  the  production  of  a  female 
hybrid,  now  five  years  old,  and  bearing  both  in  her  form  and  in  her  color  very 
decided  indications  of  her  mixed  origin.  I  subsequently  parted  with  the  seven- 
eighths  Arabian  mare  to  Sir  Gore  Ousley,  who  has  bred  from  her,  by  a  very 
fine  black  Arabian  horse.  I  yesterday  morning  examined  the  produce,  namely,, 
a  two-year-old  filly  and  a  year-old  colt.  They  have  the  character  of  the  Ara- 
bian breed  as  decidedly  as  can  be  expected,  where  fifteen-sixteenths  of  the 


HOW  THE  TROTTING   HORSE   IS   BRED.  46? 

blood  are  Arabian;  and  they  are  fine  specimens  of  that  breed;  but  both  in  their 
color  and  in  the  hair  of  their  manes  they  have  a  striking  resemblance  to  the- 
quagga.  Their  color  is  bay,  marked  more  or  less  like  the  quagga,  in  a  darker 
tint.  Both  are  distinguished  by  the  dark  line  along  the  ridge  of  the  back,  the 
dark  stripes  across  the  forehand,  and  the  dark  bars  across  the  back  part  of  the 
legs.  The  stripes  acioss  the  forehand  of  the  colt  are  confined  to  the  withers 
and  the  part  of  the  neck  next  to  them.  Those  on  the  filly  cover  nearly  the 
whole  of  the  neck  and  the  back  as  far  as  the  flanks.  The  color  of  her  coat 
on  the  neck  adjoining  the  mane  is  pale,  and  approaching  a  dun,  rendering  the 
stripes  there  more  conspicuous  than  those  on  the  colt.  The  same  pale  tint  ap- 
pears in  a  less  degree  on  the  rump;  and  in  this  circumstance  of  the  dun  tint 
also  she  resembles  the  quagga. 

"The  colt  and  filly  were  taken  up  from  grass  for  my  inspection,  and  owing 
to  the  present  state  of  their  coats  I  could  not  ascertain  whether  they  bear  any 
indications  of  spots  on  the  rump,  the  dark  pasterns,  or  the  narrow  strips  on 
tbe  forehead,  with  which  the  quagga  is  marked.  They  have  no  appearance  of 
the  dark  lines  along  the  belly  or  the  white  tufts  on  the  side  of  the  mane. 
Both  their  manes  are  black;  that  of  the  filly  is  short  and  stiff,  and  stands  up- 
right; and  Sir  Gore  Ousley's  stud  groom  alleged  it  never  was  otherwise;  that 
of  the  colt  is  long,  but  so  stiff  as  to  arch  upward,  and  to  hang  clear  of  the 
side  of  the  neck,  in  which  circumstance  it  resembles  that  of  a  hybrid.  This  is 
the  more  remarkable,  as  the  mane  of  the  Arabian  breed  hangs  lank  and  closer 
to  the  neck  than  those  of  most  others.  The  bars  across  the  legs,  both  of  the 
hybrid  and  of  the  colt  and  filly,  are  more  strongly  defined  and  darker  than  those 
on  the  legs  of  the  quagga,  which  are  very  slightly  marked;  and  though  the 
hybrid  has  several  quagga  marks  which  the  colt  and  filly  have  not,  yet  the 
most  striking,  namely,  the  stripes  on  the  forehand,  are  fewer  and  less  appar- 
ent than  those  on  the  colt  and  filly.  These  circumstances  may  appear  singu- 
lar, but  I  think  you  will  agree  with  me  that  they  are  trifles  compared  with  the 
extraordinary  fact  of  so  many  striking  features  which  do  not  belong  to  the 
dam,  being  in  two  successive  instances  communicated  through  her  to  the  pro- 
geny not  only  of  another  sire,  who  also  had  them  not,  but  to  a  sire  probably 
of  another  species;  for  such  we  have  very  strong  reasons  for  supposing  the 
quagga  to  be  " 

This  is  Lord  Morton's  original  quagga  story  without  abridge- 
ment, the  substance  of  which  has  been  quoted  and  printed  mil- 
lions of  times,  but  I  never  have  seen  anything  like  an  analysis  of 
it,  either  for  or  against  its  value  as  determining  any  fact  or  prin- 
ciple in  breeding.  The  elements  are:  a  young  chestnut  mare, 
"seven-eighths  Arabian  blood,"  was  bred  to  a  quagga  and  pro- 
duced a  hybrid.  She  was  afterward  bred  to  a  black  "Arabian" 
and  produced  a  colt  and  a  filly  that  were  supposed  to  be  marked 
like  the  quagga;  hence,  first  impregnations  influence  all  subse- 
quent foals;  and  hence  "the  heredity  of  influence,"  as  called  by 
some  scientists.  Lord  Morton  has  given  an  intelligent  and,  no- 


468  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

doubt,  faithful  description  of  the  colt  and  the  filly  that  came  out 
of  the  mare  that  had  previously  produced  the  hybrid  quagga;  but 
he  has  failed  to  show  that  none  of  the  near-by  ancestors  of  the 
sire  and  dam  of  this  colt  and  filly  were  of  a  dun  color  and  were 
marked  just  as  the  colt  and  filly  were  marked.  Until  it  is  shown 
that  the  peculiar  markings  of  this  colt  and  filly  could  not  have 
been  inherited  from  their  natural  ancestors,  the  half-formed 
theory  that  they  were  the  result  of  the  coupling  with  the  quagga, 
years  before,  wholly  fails  to  satisfy  the  human  understanding. 
When  Lord  Morton  tells  us  that  the  dam  was  seven-eighths,  and 
the  sire  full  Arabian,  he  seems  to  think  he  has  covered  that 
point;  but  he  has  not,  for  he  has  not  shown  that  there  was  a  sin- 
gle drop  of  Arabian  blood  in  either  of  them.  It  must  not  be  for- 
gotten that  at  the  period  here  referred  to  all  Eastern  and  South- 
ern horses  were  called  Arabians,  when  not  one  in  fifty  of  them 
ever  saw  Arabia  either  through  his  own  eyes  or  through  the  eyes 
of  any  of  his  ancestors.  The  composite  material  out  of  which 
the  English  race  horse  was  built  up  was  of  all  colors,  including 
the  dun,  with  the  dark  stripe  on  his  back,  the  short  stripes  or 
patches  on  his  shoulders,  and  the  transverse  bars  on  his  legs. 
A  horse  of  this  color,  I  am  told,  once  won  the  Derby.  The 
Kattywar  horses  of  Northwestern  India,  Mr.  Darwin  informs  us, 
are  from  fifteen  to  sixteen  hands  high,  of  all  colors,  with  the 
several  shades  of  dun  the  most  common,  and  when  one  of  them 
fails  of  having  the  spinal  stripe,  the  shoulder  stripes,  and  the  leg 
stripes  the  purity  of  his  breeding  is  doubted.  This  is  the  type 
of  horse  the  British  officers  ride,  and  when  their  term  of  service 
expires  sometimes  bring  home  with  them.  There  are  many 
duns  in  Persia  and  in  Eastern  Asia  Minor,  I  am  informed,  and 
the  stripes  seem  to  belong  to  the  color.  In  Norway  the  color  of 
the  native  horse  is  dun  and  the  stripes  are  considered  evidence  of 
pure  breeding.  Many  of  the  mountain  horses  of  Spain  are  duns, 
with  the  stripes.  The  dun  color  prevailed,  to  a  greater  or  less 
extent,  among  the  native  English  horses  of  three  hundred  years 
ago,  and  some  of  them  were  brought  to  this  country  in  the  early 
colonial  period.  Mr.  Darwin,  in  his  "Animals  and  Plants  under 
Domestication,"  fully  describes  the  dun  horses  of  Devonshire,  and 
in  order  to  be  clearly  understood  he  figures  one  of  them  showing 
the  dark  stripes  on  the  shoulder  and  the  transverse  bars  upon  the 
legs.  I  have  seen  numbers  of  dun  horses  so  marked,  in  this 
country,  the  most  conspicuous  that  I  can  now  recall  being  Wapsie, 


HOW   THE   TROTTING    HORSE    IS    BRED.  469 

the  distinguished  son  of  Green's  'Bashaw.  The  fact  that  horses 
of  this  color  and  marking  are  to  be  found  in  all  parts  of  the 
globe,  has  led  many  thoughtful  writers  to  the  conclusion  that 
these  characteristics  are  among  the  very  earliest  in  the  history  of 
the  horse.  To  bring  this  instance  to  a  close,  I  must  say: 

1.  Beyond  the  color  alone  of  the  sire  and  dam  of  this  colt  and 
filly,  there  is  no  evidence  whatever  that  they  might  not  have 
inherited,  by  ordinary  generation,  the  color  and  markings  from 
some  of  their  ancestors. 

2.  The  miscegenous  breeding  of  the  ass  upon  the  mare  has. 
been  practiced,  we  know,  for  more  than  three  thousand  years, 
and  yet  in  all  that  time,  and  down  to  our  own  day  and  experiences, 
there  has  been  no  established  indication  that  the  first  impregna- 
tion of  the  filly  by  the  ass  had  any  influence  whatever  upon  her 
subsequent  produce  by  the  horse. 

This  theory  of  the  first  impregnation  having  an  influence  on 
all  subsequent  produce  is  probably  more  generally  maintained 
among  dog  fanciers  than  any  other  class  of  breeders.  In  some 
instances  when  a  valuable  maiden .  bitch  gets  astray  she  is. 
banished  from  the  kennel  and  either  destroyed  or  given  away. 
For  this  foolish  notion  some  antique  authority  might  be  cited. 
Burdach,  a  French  writer  on  physiology,  says: 

"If  a  bitcb  be  once  put  to  a  dog  of  anotber  race,  every  litter  of  puppies 
afterward  will  include  one  belonging  to  that  other  breed,  except  tbe  first  time 
sbe  be  put  only  to  dogs  of  her  own  breed." 

This  is  a  kind. of  pseudo  science  that  is  only  calculated  to  mis- 
lead, for  the  vital  facts  are  omitted.  What  was  the  pedigree  of 
the  bitch?  She  may  have  looked  like  a  well-bred  pointer  and  a 
high  price  may  have  been  paid  for  her,  but  her  sire  may  have 
been  a  mongrel,  or,  possibly,  a  miserable  cur.  No  dog  breeder 
or  dog  dealer  has  ever  been  known  to  drown  the  results  of  a 
mesalliance  if  it  was  a  fairly  good-looking  puppy.  It  goes  into 
the  records  as  a  thoroughbred  and  finds  a  market.  When  a  dog 
and  a  bitch,  seeming  to  be  well-bred  and  costing  a  high  price, 
bring  into  the  world  a  litter  of  puppies  showing  a  mixed  inherit- 
ance, the  fancier  at  once  jumps  to  the  conclusion  that  there  i& 
something  mysterious  about  it,  and  as  he  has  heard  of  the  evil 
results  of  first  impregnations,  he  thinks  he  has  discovered  the 
source  of  the  trouble  and  straightway  this  is  another  example 
resulting  from  first  impregnation.  He  then  goes  back  on  the 


47C  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

dealer,  or  possibly  the  breeder,  and  there  to  conceal  the  fact  that 
the  blood  of  his  kennel  was  not  pure,  he  would  naturally  play 
the  rogue  and  admit  that  the  young  bitch  might  have  got  astray. 
This  satisfies  the  unsophisticated  owner,  and  another  trick  of  an 
unscrupulous  "dog  jockey"  goes  on  record  as  a  case  of  "heredity 
of  influence,"  when  in  fact  it  was  nothing  more  nor  less  than  a 
dirty  fraud  in  the  breeding  of  the  dog  or  bitch,  or  both. 

Some  of  the  early  French  writers  on  scientific  subjects,  as 
Burdach,  Michelet,  etc.,  advanced  t'he  theory  more  than  a  hun- 
dred years  ago  that  the  children  of  a  second  marriage,  in  some 
cases,  inherited  the  resemblance  and  character  of  the  first  hus- 
band. In  the  nature  of  things  this  theory  could  have  but  very 
feeble  support  and  that  chiefly  among  scandalmongers.  In  con- 
nection with  this  phase  of  "heredity  of  influence"  I  will  give  a 
little  instance  of  my  personal  experience.  Twenty  years  ago,  or 
more,  I  was  making  an  address  before  an  association,  in  a  New  Eng- 
land city,  on  the  subject  of  "How  to  Breed  the  Trotting  Horse." 
The  audience  was  very  large  and  composed  exclusively  of  gentle- 
men. At  the  opening  it  was  announced  that  at  the  close  of  each 
specific  topic  an  opportunity  would  be  given  to  any  one  in  the 
audience  to  ask  questions  on  the  thoughts  presented.  The  signal 
had  hardly  been  given  when  a  gentleman  arose  in  the  audience 
and  raised  the  question  whether  I  had  not  omitted  an  important 
fact  in  heredity?  He  then  went  on  to  rehearse  the  everlasting 
quagga  story,  with  a  most  confident  flourish  of  his  learning  and  a 
sure  grasp  on  a  triumph. 

"The  quagga  story,"  I  remarked,  "is  well  known  to  everybody, 
but  there  are  some  facts  about  it  that  are  not  known  to  anybody. 
The  mare  herself  may  have  been  from  a  dun  tribe  of  horses,  or 
the  horse  to  which  she  was  afterward  bred  may  have  been  from 
such  a  tribe,  hundreds  of  which  have  stripes  on  the  back,  the 
shoulders  and  the  legs,  and  thus  the  stripes  might  be  accounted 
for  by  indirect  heredity;  not  because  the  quagga  had  stripes,  but 
because  the  dun  horse  ancestry  had  stripes.  Most  people,  proba- 
bly, look  upon  it  as  a  freak  of  nature,  and  as  the  case  has  never 
duplicated  itself,  in  all  the  years  before  or  since,  it  fails  to  be  a 
practical  question,  and  in  our  personal  experiences  as  breeders, 
we  need  not  be  afraid  of  suffering  harm  from  it." 

"Your  explanation,"  replied  my  interlocutor,  "fails  to  cover 
the  case,  I  think,  for  I  have  seen,  with  my  own  eyes,  instances 
of  it  in  the  human  family  and  I  will  relate  one.  A  dozen  years 


HOW   THE   TROTTING    HORSE    IS    BRED.  471 

ago,  or  more,  a  friend  of  mine  married  a  lady  who  was  a  brunette 
in  complexion,  with  black  eyes  and  black  hair.  He  was  of  florid 
complexion,  with  bine  eyes  and  sandy  hair,  just  about  the  color 
of  my  own.  After  three  or  four  years  the  husband  died  leaving 
two  children  of  his  own  complexion  and  color  of  eyes  and  hair. 
In  course  of  time  the  widow  married  a  man  with  black  hair  and 
black  eyes,  and  there  came  a  second  set  of  children  that  were  as 
perfect  reproductions  of  the  first  husband  as  his  own  children 
were  in  complexion  and  color  of  hair." 

"How  long  have  you.  personally  known  this  family,  and  have 
you  ever  seen  these  two  sets  of  children?" 

"  I  have  known  the  family  intimately  ever  since  the  first  mar- 
riage and  I  have  seen  both  sets  of  children  very  often." 

"You  certainly  have  had  abundant  opportunity  to  know 
whereof  you  affirm,  and  the  facts  seem  so  plain  that  it  would  be  a 
refinement  on  folly  to  undertake  to  contradict  them;  but  there 
is  one  element  in  this  case  that  has  not  been  explained,  and  it  is 
.a  vital  one.  How  are  we  to  know  whether  some  man  of  'sandy 
complexion'  and  with  'hair  and  eyes  just  the  color  of  yours,'  is 
not  the  father  of  this  second  set  of  children?" 

This  ended  th^  colloquy  in  a  "roof-raising"  shout,  and  I  never 
have  been  called  upon  since,  in  a  public  meeting,  to  even  allude 
to  the  "heredity  of  influence."  With  the  experiences  of  thou- 
sands of  years  of  miscegnatious  breeding  between  the  ass  and  the 
mare  and  no  indication  among  the  writers  of  the  ancients  as  to 
the  evil  and  abiding  effects  of  first  impregnations;  and  with  the 
experiences  of  more  than  a  century  in  this  country,  with  the 
same  results,  we  are  compelled  to  throw  over  all  claims  of  this 
kind  until  furnished  with  full  and  complete  pedigrees  of  the  sire 
and  dam,  showing  the  color  and  markings  of  each  individual  for 
a  number  of  generations. 

HEREDITY  OF  ACQUIRED  CHARACTERS  AND  INSTINCTS. — On 
this  point  there  is  a  lack  of  unanimity  among  the  promoters  of 
the  "primordial  germ"  theory,  and  the  principal  advocate  of  the 
negative  side  of  this  question  appears  to  be  Professor  Weismann. 
Mere  opinions  of  men,  no  difference  how  profound  their  learning, 
cannot  be  of  any  value,  unless  they  are  sustained  by  actual  ex- 
periences, on  questions  of  this  kind.  To  determine  this  matter 
we  are  not  dependent  upon  any  of  the  explanations  of  the  cen- 
tral Darwinian  hypothesis  of  creation  without  a  Creator,  for  we 
have  all  around  us,  safely  within  the  historic  period  of  human 


472  THE    HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

observation  and  experience,  mountains  of  evidence,  so  to  speak,, 
heaped  upon  us,  going  to  show  that  "acquired  character  and  in- 
stincts" are  transmitted  and  become  hereditary. 

Dr.  Pritchard,  in  his  "Natural  History  of  Man,"  gives  the 
following  illustration  on  this  point: 

"Two  other  very  important  observations  made  by  M.  Roulin,  in 
South  America,  were  pointed  out  by  M.  Geoffrey  St.  Hillaire,  in  his  report 
to  the  Academy  of  Sciences.  They  refer  to  the  fact  of  the  hereditary 
transmission  of  habits  originally  impressed  with  care  and  art  upon  the 
ancestors.  Of  this  fact  I  will  adduce  other  examples  in  the  sequel;  at  present 
I  only  advert  to  M.  Roulin's  observations.  The  horses  bred  on  the  grazing 
farms  of  the  table-lands  of  the  Cordillera  are  carefully  taught  a  peculiar  pace, 
which  is  a  sort  of  running  amble.  This  is  not  their  natural  mode  of  progres- 
sion, but  they  are  inured  to  it  very  early,  and  the  greatest  pains  are  taken  to 
prevent  them  from  moving  in  any  other  gait;  in  this  way  the  acquired  habit 
becomes  a  second  nature.  It  happens  occasionally  that  such  horses  becoming 
lame,  or  no  longer  fit  for  use,  it  is  then  customary  to  let  them  loose,  if  they 
happen  to  be  well  grown  stallions,  into  the  pasture  grounds  It  is  constantly 
observed  that  these  horses  become  the  sires  of  a  race  to  which  the  ambling 
pace  is  natural,  and  which  requires  no  teaching.  The  fact  is  so  well  known 
that  such  colts  have  received  a  particular  name;  they  are  termed  '  aguilillas."* 

The  fact  that  there  were  some  pacers  in  South  America  came* 
tome  from  many  sources,  and  especially  from  gentlemen  of  in- 
telligence and  character  who  had  spent  years  in  that  country,  and 
was  for  a  long  time  a  puzzle  to  me.  All  the  evidences  of  history 
went  to  show  that  the  horse  stock  of  South  America  was  Spanish, 
and  no  evidence  could  be  found  that  the  Spanish  horse  was  a- 
pacer,  or  that  there  was  any  tendency  to  pace  in  the  blood  of  the 
Spanish  horse.  This  report  to  the  French  Academy  of  Sciences- 
was  made  in  the  early  part  of  this  century  and  is  really  the  first 
information  I  have  ever  had  of  Spanish  horses  pacing.  Dr.  Pritch- 
ard was  one  of  the  earlier  modern  writers  on  natural  history 
and  stands  very  high  as  a  man  of  conscience  as  well  as  learning. 
The  surprising  feature  in  this  South  American  experience  is  the 
wide  and,  apparently,  immediate  measure  of  success  that  seems 
to  have  followed  the  training  to  the  pacing  gait  in  its  transmis- 
sion. It  may  be  taken  as  a  rule  that  the  changing  of  the  gait 
from  the  diagonal  to  the  lateral,  or  vice  versa,  is  a  slow  process, 
and  it  seems  to  me  that  with  few  exceptions  it  would  require 
several  generations  before  the  new  habit  of  action  would  become 
fixed  in  the  breed.  It  is  just  possible,  however,  that  there  may 


IIO\V    THE   TROTTING    HORSE    IS    BRED.  4?3 

have  been  a  tincture  of  pacing  blood  in  the  Spanish  horses  of  the 
sixteenth  century.  The  Visigoths,  one  of  the  early  Asiatic  hordes 
that  overran  Europe,  first  settled  in  Scandinavia,  and  the  south- 
ern part  of  Sweden  is  still  called  "Gothland."  After  a  long  stay 
in  that  country  they  became  dissatisfied  with  soil  and  climate 
and  determined  to  seek  another.  According  to  the  historians, 
they  first  migrated  in  a  southeastward  direction  and  from 
there  in  a  southwestward  till  they  reached  the  southern  part  of 
France,  from  which  they  soon  passed  over  into  Spain,  which  they 
subdued,  and  established  there  a  dynasty  which  lasted  two  hun- 
dred years.  In  A.D.  711  the  Saracens  from  Africa  crossed  over, 
and  after  a  very  bloody  battle  lasting  two  days,  defeated  Ehoderic, 
the  last  of  the  dynasty,  and  cut  his  army  to  pieces.  In  Scandina- 
via, and  especially  in  Norway  and  Sweden,  we  find  plenty  of  dun 
horses  that  are  pacers,  and  they  are  recognized  as  a  very  old 
hreed.  In  the  mountains  of  Spain  we  also  find  small  dun  horses, 
and  it  is,  perhaps,  not  an  unreasonable  possibility  that  the 
Visigoths  may  have  carried  some  of  their  horse  stock  with  them 
in  their  migration  from  the  North  to  the  South  of  Europe,  and 
thus  this  habit  of  action  that  may  have  remained  for  centuries 
latent  in  the  breed  may  have  been  unusually  plastic  in  its  res- 
toration. This,  however,  is  a  mere  surmise  as  to  a  possibility 
and  cannot  displace  the  historic  observations  reported  by  M. 
Eoulin  and  presented  before  the  French  Academy.  The  gait  of 
the  South  American  pacers,  as  I  understand  it,  is  not  that  of  the 
pure  pace,  with  two  strokes  completing  the  revolution,  but  is 
more  like  the  "saddle  gaits"  that  we  find  in  the  West  and  South- 
west of  our  own  country.  The  true  pace  seems  to  be  exceptional, 
hecause  that  is  not  a  saddle  gait.  It  is  a  fact  often  observed  in 
this  country  that  foals  from  parents  trained  to  the  saddle  gaits 
will  take  to  those  gaits  naturally  and  as  soon  as  they  are  dropped. 
In  a  preceding  part  of  this  work  I  have  given  some  consideration 
to  the  fact  that  three  or  four  hundred  years  ago  the  horses  of  our 
English  ancestors  were  largely  pacers,  and  to  the  methods  adopted 
in  that  day  for  changing  the  action  from  the  diagonal  to  the 
lateral  gait — the  hopples,  rattles,  weights,  etc.  The  descendants 
of  those  horses,  brought  to  this  country  by  the  colonists,  as  will 
be  seen  at  another  place,  were  nearly  all  pacers. 

The  following  letter,  addressed  by  Dr.  William  Huggins  to 
Charles  Darwin  and  by  him  published  in  "Nature"  twenty  years 
ago,  very  strongly  illustrates  the  heredity  of  instincts,  and  as  it 


474  THE   HOUSE    OF    AMERICA. 

is  authentic  and  true  beyond  question  I  will  here  insert  it.     Dr. 

Huggins  says: 

"I  wish  to  communicate  to  you  a  curious  case  of  mental  peculiarity.  I  pos- 
sess an  English  mastiff,  by  name  Kepler,  a  son  of  the  celebrated  Turk  out  of 
Venus.  I  brought  the  dog,  when  six  weeks  old,  from  the  stable  in  which  he 
was  born.  The  first  time  I  took  him  out  he  started  back  in  alarm  at  the  first 
butcher's  shop  he  had  ever  seen.  I  soon  found  he  had  a  violent  antipathy  to 
butchers  and  butchers'  shops.  When  six  months  old  a  servant  took  him  with 
her  on  an  errand.  At  a  short  distance  before  coming  to  the  house  she  had  to 
pass  a  butcher's  shop;  the  dog  threw  himself  down  (being  led  by  a  string), 
and  neither  coaxing  nor  threats  would  make  him  pass  the  shop.  The  dog  was 
too  heavy  to  be  carried,  and  as  a  crowd  collected,  the  servant  had  to  return 
with  the  dog  more  than  a  mile,  and  then  go  without  him.  This  occurred  about 
two  years  ago.  The  antipathy  still  continues,  but  the  dog  will  pass  nearer  to 
a  shop  than  he  formerly  would.  About  two  months  ago,  in  a  little  book  on 
dogs,  published  by  Dean,  I  discovered  that  the  same  strange  antipathy  is  shown 
in  the  father,  Turk.  I  then  wrote  to  Mr.  Nichols,  the  former  owner  of  Turk, 
to  ask  him  for  any  information  he  might  have  on  the  point.  He  replied  :  "  I 
can  say  that  the  same  antipathy  exists  in  King,  the  sire  of  Turk,  in  Turk,  in 
Punch  (son  of  Turk),  out  of  Meg,  and  in  Paris  (son  of  Turk  out  of  Juno). 
Paris  has  the  greatest  antipathy,  as  he  would  hardly  go  into  a  street  where  a 
butcher's  shop  is,  and  would  run  away  after  passing  it.  When  a  cart  with  a 
butcher's  man  came  into  the  place  where  the  dogs  were  kept,  although  they 
could  not  see  him,  they  all  were  ready  to  break  their  chains.  A  master 
butcher,  dresssd  privately,  called  one  evening  on  Paris'  master  to  see  the  dog. 
He  had  hardly  entered  the  house  before  the  dog  (though  shut  in)  was  so  much 
excited  that  he  had  to  be  put  into  a  shed,  and  the  butcher  was  forced  to  leave 
before  seeing  the  dog.  The  same  dog,  at  Hastings,  made  a  spring  at  a  gentle- 
man who  came  into  the  hotel.  The  owner  caught  the  dog  and  apologized,  and 
said  he  never  knew  him  to  do  so  before,  except  when  a  butcher  came  to  his 
house.  The  gentleman  at  once  said  that  was  his  business.  So  you  see  that 
they  inherited  these  antipathies,  and  show  a  great  deal  of  breed." 

Some  ancestor,  not  far  removed,,  of  these  three  generations  of 
dogs  must  have  suffered  a  life  of  oppression  and  cruelty  at  the 
hands  of  an  unfeeling  master,  and  that  master  must  have  been  a 
butcher.  We  fail  to  understand  and  appreciate  the  mentality  of 
the  dog  and  the  horse,  and  as  they  are  above  the  average  of  the 
brute  creation  we  fail  of  a  word  midway  between  instinct  and 
reason  to  express  that  mentality.  We  call  it  "instinct, "  and  cor- 
rectly, too,  but  this  grade  of  instinct  requires  a  more  expressive 
word  to  represent  it.  That  a  feeling  of  antipathy  should  have 
been  so  deeply  seated  in  the  nature  and  life  of  a  dog  that  the 
resentment  and  hatred  should  have  been  transmitted  to  his  de- 


HOW   THE   TROTTIXG    HORSE    IS    BRED.  475 

scendants  for  three  generations  in  succession  is  a  very  remarka- 
ble instance  of  the  heredity  of  instinct.  As  a  companion  piece 
to  the  foregoing  and  as  showing  the  difference  between  the 
hatred  of  one  dog  and  the  gratitude  and  love  of  another,  I  will 
relate  an  instance  that  came  under  my  own  observation  and 
knowledge  more  than  forty  years  ago.  General  John  G.  Gordon 
was  a  merchant  in  Muscatine,  Iowa,  and  Dr.  George  Reeder  was 
a  physician  of  great  skill  and  very  large  practice.  These  two 
gentlemen  were  among  my  most  intimate  personal  friends.  On 
a  certain  occasion  one  of  Gordon's  well-to-do  farmer  customers 
brought  him  a  puppy  a  few  months  old  as  a  present.  He  had 
no  use  for  a  dog  and  didn't  want  one,  but  he  was  not  willing  to 
forfeit  either  the  good  wishes  or  the  custom  of  his  farmer 
friend,  so  he  accepted  the  gift  with  thanks.  When  he  took  the 
puppy  home  in  the  evening  there  was  consternation  in  the  house- 
hold, and  in  a  family  conference  it  was  decided  that  he  should 
not  be  allowed  to  run  through  the  house  with  his  dirty  feet,  and 
thereupon  he  was  consigned  to  the  cow  stable,  and  that  became 
his  home  as  long  as  he  lived.  Every  night  and  morning  he  got 
a  liberal  ration  of  milk  fresh  from  the  cow  and  they  soon  became 
inseparable  friends.  In  cold  nights,  as  if  by  mutual  agreement, 
he  always  slept  cuddled  up  close  to  the  cow.  At  that  time  in 
the  history  of  the  town,  the  country  was  open  and  pasture  abun- 
dant in  every  direction,  and  everybody  kept  a  cow.  In  the  morn- 
ings these  cows  would  start  out  to  their  grazing  grounds,  in 
bands,  radiating  in  every  direction,  and  in  the  evenings  could  be 
seen  "the  lowing  herds  wind  slowly  o'er  the  lea."  Gordon's 
dog  never  missed  a  day  for  years  in  going  with  his  friend  the 
cow  and  returning  with  her  in  the  evening. 

Dr.  Reeder  used  two  or  three  horses  in  his  practice,  and  his  sta- 
ble was  on  the  same  alley,  and  some  ten  or  twelve  rods  distant  from 
Gordon's  cow  stable.  One  day  in  winter  time  he  was  having  his 
bins  filled  with  corn  in  the  ear,  and  to  make  room  for  it  all  he 
had  to  fill  up  a  large  dry-goods  box  that  stood  in  one^corner  of 
the  itable.  While  he  was  supervising  the  delivery  of  the  corn 
Gordon's  dog  came  in,  reared  up  on  his  hind  legs,  seized  an  ear 
of  corn  and  made  off  with  it.  The  doctor  was  very  much  sur- 
prised at  this  act  of  the  dog  as  he  never  had  seen  or  heard  of  a 
dog  eating  corn.  While  he  was  thinking  about  this  strange  act 
of  the  dog,  he  came  back  again  and  seized  another  ear  and  made 
off  with  it.  This  time  the  doctor  watched  him,  and  he  carried  it 


476  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

direct  to  his  friend  the  cow,  dropped  it  before  her,  and  she  soon 
made  away  with  it.  This  phenomenal  exhibition  of  the  attachment 
of  one  animal  to  another  of  entirely  different  nature  aroused  the 
doctor's  desire  for  a  further  confirmation  of  what  he  had  seen. 
Concealing  himself  behind  the  door  he  awaited  further  develop- 
ments and  in  a  little  while  the  dog  came  back,  seized  the  third 
ear,  and  whipping  past  some  other  cows,  carried  it  safely  to  his 
friend.  I  have  seen  this  dog  a  hundred  times,  and  he  was  a 
mongrel  nondescript,  about  the  size  of  the  average  pointer,  with 
nothing  remarkable  about  his  appearance;  but  in  all  the  illustra- 
tions of  all  the  naturalists  I  have  not  met  with  any  authenticated 
instance  where  character  in  a  dumb  animal  was  so  beautifully 
exhibited.  In  history  we  have  many  touching  examples  of  the 
attachment  of  the  dog  to  his  master  and  of  his  heroism  in  de- 
fending the  weak  against  the  strong,  but  this  case  seems  to  be 
unique.  Here  is  a  character  developed  that  is  far  more  than  "the 
sum  of  inherited  habits."  We  may  call  it  instinct,  but  that  word 
fails  to  express  it.  In  whatever  light  we  view  this  character,  it  has 
in  it  an  element  of  reason  and  we  have  no  word  that  expresses  it. 

The  oldest  written  evidence  we  have  of  the  origin  of  the  setter 
dog  dates  back  about  two  hundred  years,  in  which  we  find  John 
Harris  agreeing  to  teach  Henry  Herbert's  "spaniel  bitch  Quand  " 
to  set  game.  Allusions  are  made  in  the  old  writers  to  dogs  used 
for  this  purpose  long  before,  but  the  setter  certainly  has  an 
.ancestry  dating  back  at  least  two  hundred  years.  The  pointer 
is  of  much  more  recent  origin  and  seems  to  have  come  from  an 
.ancestry  wholly  distinct  from  that  of  the  setter,  and  yet,  in  the 
field,  it  would  be  very  difficult  for  the  most  competent  jury  to 
decide  which  stands  to  his  game  with  the  greater  steadiness.  It 
is  agreed,  I  think,  among  experienced  sportsmen  and  breeders 
that  the  best  dogs  are  the  result  of  couplings  made  in  the  midst 
of  the  hunting  season  when  the  instincts  of  the  parents  are  aroused 
and  active  under  the  gun.  Puppies  so  bred  are  already  half- 
trained  when  they  are  whelped.  The  instinct  to  point  the  game- 
instead  of  rushing  upon  it  is  an  instinct  acquired  at  an  earlier  or 
later  date,  well  within  the  historic  period,  and  we  know  that  it  is 
transmitted  and  inherited  under  the  laws  of  heredity.  We  know 
also  that  this  instinct  is  strengthened  and  improved  by  training 
and  use;  and  at  the  same  time  it  is  weakened,  if  not  obliterated, 
by  neglect  and  non-use  for  a  few  generations. 

The  Scotch  collie,  with  plenty  to  do,  is  altogether  the  most 


HOW  THE  TROTTIKG   HORSE   IS   BRED.  477* 

useful,  and  hence,  in  a  utilitarian  sense,  the  most  valuable  of  all 
the  varieties  of  the  canine  race.  In  understanding  his  master's 
commands  and  the  motions  of  his  hand  in  the  management  of  the 
flock,  he  evinces  an  intelligence,  an  instinct,  that  is  almost  human. 
There  is  a  marked  distinction  between  the  instinct  of  the  pointer 
and  the  collie.  The  former  acts  chiefly  by  his  innate  mental 
endowments,  while  the  latter  is  at  his  best  when  carrying  out  the 
will  of  his  master.  In  both  cases  the  instinct  was  acquired  in 
comparatively  recent  years,  and  it  is  now  fixed  in  the  breeds  and 
is  transmitted  with  great  certainty. 

The  most  remarkable  results  in  the  development  and  use  of  an 
instinct  that  was  practically  latent,  or  never  developed,  are  to  be 
found  in  the  history  of  the  American  Trotting  Horse.  Fifty-one 
years  ago  Lady  Suffolk  was  the  first  trotter  to  cover  the  mile  in 
2:29^.  Four  years  later  Pelham,  a  converted  pacer,  trotted  in 
2:28,  and  four  years  still  later  Highland  Maid,  a  converted  pacer, 
trotted  in  2:27.  In  1859  Flora  Temple  trotted  in  2:19f;  in  1874 
Goldsmith  Maid  trotted  in  2:14;  in  1885  Maud  S.  trotted  in 
2:08|;  in  1892  Nancy  Hanks  trotted  in  2:04;  and  in  1894  AJix 
trotted  in  2:03f.  But  a  greater  performance  than  any  of  these 
was  that  of  the  two-year-old  colt,  Arion,  when  in  1891  he  covered 
the  mile  in  2:10f.  I  have  no  hesitation  in  pronouncing  this  the 
greatest  performance  ever  made,  to  this  date,  not  because  it  was 
the  fastest,  as  shown  by  the  watch,  but  because  it  was  made  by  a 
two-year-old,  and  from  this  fact  there  had  been  no  time  for  pro- 
longed and  skillful  training.  He  was  essentially  the  product  of 
heredity  and  not  the  result  of  education. 

Fifty-one  years  ago  there  was  but  one  animal  in  the  2:30  list, 
and  at  the  close  of  1896  there  were  over  fifteen  thousand  within 
that  limit  and  far  more  than  fifteen  thousand  others  hovering  on 
its  border.  This  astounding  result  must  be  attributed  primarily 
to  a  trotting  inheritance,  but  this  inheritance  has  been  constantly 
strengthened,  reinforced,  fortified  by  the  acquired  capacities  re- 
sulting from  the  development  of  the  trotting  speed  of  succeeding 
generations.  This  is  not  a  mere  estimate  of  what  has  resulted 
from  acquired  characters  and  instincts,  for  if  we  put  all  the 
observations  of  all  the  writers  on  subjects  of  natural  history, 
large  and  small,  together,  they  make  but  a  meager  and  unsatis- 
factory showing  when  compared  with  the  fifteen  thousand  actual 
experiences,  officially  noted  and  recorded  on  the  spot  and  printed 
in  "Wallace's  Year  Book."  In  all  the  world  there  is  no  other 


478  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

collection  of  statistics  so  vast,  so  accurate  and  so  valuable  as  is 
there  to  be  found,  touching  the  question  we  are  considering. 

While  the  heredity  of  acquired  characters  and  instincts  is  thus 
clearly  and  fully  established,  there  is  another  truth  intimately 
connected  with  it  that  should  not  be  forgotten.  In  an  inherit- 
ance springing  from  recent  acquisitions  there  seems  to  be  less  of 
adhesive  strength  than  in  one  .that  has  come  down  through  many 
generations.  This  being  true,  it  follows  that  whether  the  lines 
of  inheritance  be  long  or  short  there  must  be  an  intelligent  and 
constant  exercise  of  good  judgment  in  strengthening  them 
by  bringing  the  best  and  strongest  together  and  uniting  them  in 
the  prospective  foal.  When  this  has  been  done  it  is  possible  that 
the  foal  may  not  be  of  much  value,  but  the  chances  of  success 
are  in  exact  proportion  to  the  strength  of  all  the  lines  of  inherit- 
ance that  are  united  in  the  foal.  Beyond  the  chance  of  failure 
and  beyond  the  average  chance  of  an  average  production,  there 
is  a  chance  for  something  better  than  any  of  the  ancestors.  This 
latter  hope  always  has  been  and  always  will  be  the  inspiration  of 
the  breeder.  In  his  structure  and  form  he  may  be  an  improve- 
ment on  his  parents,  but  his  value  as  a  trotter  can  only  be  de- 
termined by  the  development  of  his  instincts  and  speed  as  a 
trotter.  Without  such  development  he  may  transmit  what  he 
inherits,  but  he  adds  nothing  to  his  inheritance  except  by  the  de- 
velopment of  his  own  powers.  These  accretions,  growing  out  of 
the  development  of  succeeding  generations,  are  the  material  cause 
that  has  placed  the  American  Trotter  at  the  very  edge  of  two 
minutes  to  the  mile,  and  with  wise  management  will  eventually 
carry  him  away  beyond  that  rate  of  speed.  This  whole  topic 
may  be  summed  up  in  a  single  sentence:  every  acquisition  of 
eminence  and  superiority  adds  something  to  the  value  of  what 
is  transmitted. 

HEREDITY  OF  BAD  QUALITIES,  UNSOUNDNESS,  ETC. — Under  the 
laws  of  inheritance  no  distinction  can  be  made  between  the  de- 
sirable and  the  undesirable,  nor  between  the  earlier  or  later 
acquisitions,  as  they  are  all  liable  to  be  transmitted  and  to  be- 
come hereditary.  The  bitter  must  go  with  the  sweet.  Dropping 
below  is  just  as  liable  to  occur  as  rising  above  what  might  be  con- 
sidered the  average  inheritance  of  the  immediate  parents.  This 
may  result  from  following  or  throwing  back  to  some  undesirable 
or  unsound  cross  that  may  exist  in  some  of  the  lines  of  inherit- 
ance which  possibly  may  be  distant  several  generations.  As  a 


HOW   THE   TROTTJXG    HORSE    IS    BRED.  479 

practical  consideration  it  makes  but  little  difference  whether  a 
tendency  to,  or  a  fully  developed,  unsoundness  has  been  in  the 
inheritance  for  generations,  or  whether  it  may  be  the  result  of 
some  recent  accident  or  injury,  it  is  liable  to  be  transmitted.  It 
is  known  to  everybody  that  the  great  running  horse  Lexington 
was  blind,  and  it  was  urged  that  his  blindness  was  not  congenital, 
but  the  result  of  an  accident;  hence  it  was  argued  by  those  in- 
terested that  it  would  not  be  unsafe  to  breed  to  him.  It  was 
stated  and  repeated  a  hundred  times  that  while  in  training  he 
got  loose  in  his  stable  and  stuffed  himself  at  the  oats  bin,  and 
without  knowing  this  his  trainer  took  him  out  next  morning  and 
ran  him  a  trial  of  four  miles,  from  the  effects  of  which  he  lost 
his  sight.  Without  giving  full  credence  to  this  as  the  cause  of 
his  blindness,  it  is  nevertheless  true  that  he  filled  the  country 
with  blind  horses.  If,  for  example,  a  joint  or  a  ligament  or  a 
muscle  of  the  hind  leg  be  sprained  by  overexertion  or  by  a  mis- 
step, a  spavin  or  a  curb  may  develop,  or  possibly  something  still 
worse,  and  this  is  a  blemish  and  generally  an  unsoundness  that  is 
likely  to  be  transmitted,  if  not  in  a  developed  form,  then  in  an 
unmistakable  tendency  in  that  direction,  which,  in  turn,  will 
make  its  appearance  in  succeeding  generations.  The  horse  world, 
and  I  might  say,  the  whole  animal  kingdom  under  domestication, 
abounds  in  examples,  seen  and  unseen,  of  unsoundness  originat- 
ing in  injuries  to  the  parents. 


CHAPTER  XXXII. 

HOW   THE   TROTTING    HORSE    IS   BRED    (Continued). 

Trotting  speed  first  supposed  to  be  an  accident — Then,  that  it  came  front 
the  runner — William  Wheelan's  views — Test  of  powers  of  endurance — 
The  term  "  thoroughbred  "  much  abused — Definition  of  "thoroughbred"" 
— How  trotters  may  be  made  "thoroughly  bred" — How  to  study  pedi 
grees — Reward  offered  for  the  production  of  a  thoroughbred  horse  that 
was  a  natural  pacer — The  trotter  more  lasting  than  the  runner  —  The 
dam  of  Palo  Alto — Arion  as  a  two-year-old — Only  three  stallions  have 
been  able  to  get  trotters  from  running-bred  mares — "  Structural  incon- 
gruity " — The  pacer  and  trotter  inseparable — How  to  save  the  trot  and  re- 
duce the  ratio  of  pacers — Development  a  necessity — Table  proving  this 
proposition — The  "tin  cup"  policy  a  failure — Woodburn  at  the  wrong 
end  of  the  procession. 

BEFORE  the  question  of  speed  in  the  trotter  began  to  be  con- 
sidered, either  from  a  historical  or  a  philosophical  standpoint,  or, 
in  other  words,  a  question  involving  scientific  truths,  there  was  a. 
universal  concurrence  in  the  idea  that  speed  at  the  trot  was  an 
accident  and  that  there  was  nothing  of  inheritance  or  heredity 
about  it.  This  idea  was  greatly  strengthened  by  the  performances 
of  such  horses  as  Boston  Horse,  Rattler,  Edwin  Forrest,  Dutch- 
man, Confidence,  Moscow,  Pelham,  Flora  Temple,  Tacony,  etc., 
whose  origin  and  blood  were  wholly  unknown,  while  they  were- 
on  the  turf.  Contemporaneous  with  these  there  were  such 
splendid  performers  as  Topgallant,  Screwdriver,  Lady  Suffolk, 
Sally  Miller,  O'Blennis  and  many  others  that  were  known  to  be 
descended  from  Messenger,  a  horse  that  was  looked  upon  by 
everybody  as  a  "thoroughbred/'  Hence,  the  conclusion  that  the 
flying  trotter  was  either  an  accident  in  breeding,  or  his  speed 
qualities  came  from  the  English  running  horse.  The  fact  that 
such  champion  trotters,  in  their  day,  as  Pelham,  Highland  Maid, 
etc.,  had  originally  been  pacers  and  changed  from  the  lateral  to 
the  diagonal  gait  was  sedulously  concealed  from  the  public,  dur- 
ing their  day,  and  only  after  they  had  passed  away  was  this  bar- 


HOW  THE  TROTTING   HORSE   IS   BRED.  481 

sinister  in  their  origin  brought  to  light.  Doubtless  this  same 
fact  might  have  been  developed  in  the  origin  of  Edwin  Forrest 
and  others,  if  action  had  been  taken  in  time.  In  that  day — say 
the  first  half  of  this  century — it  is  not  remarkable  that  the 
plebeian  origin  of  some  of  our  most  famous  early  trotters  was  con- 
cealed, for  everybody  was  claiming  a  thoroughbred  ancestry,  and 
the  more  famous  the  performer  the  more  certain  he  was  to  be 
furnished  with  a  thoroughbred  pedigree. 

" Whatever  is  of  value  in  the  trotter  must  come  from  the  run- 
ner, and  whatever  is  of  value  in  the  runner  must  come  from  the 
Arab,"  was  the  view  that  was  universally  accepted  when  I  was 
a  boy.  And  yet  there  were  thousands  of  fast  trotters  and  fast 
pacers  in  this  country  long  before  the  first  running  horse  was 
brought  from  England,  and  England  itself  was  abundantly  sup- 
plied with  horses  several  hundred  years  before  there  was  a  horse 
in  Arabia.  These  two  facts  are  historical,  and  the  dates  make 
them  incontrovertible.  Some  forty  or  fifty  years  ago  William 
Wheelan,  a  successful  trainer  and  driver  of  trotting  horses  in  this 
country,  took  some  trotters  over  to  England,  to  try  his  "luck," 
as  others  had  done  before  him,  in  making  matches  and  winning 
stakes.  He  was  quite  successful,  and  when  he  came  home  he  was 
kept  busy  answering  questions  about  English  horses  and  why 
they  did  not  have  more  trotters  there.  He  replied  that  "there  were 
plenty  of  horses  that  could  trot  as  well  or  better  than  our  Ameri- 
can horses,  if  they  were  trained;  they  had  plenty  of  blood  and 
most  of  them  good  limbs  and  feet,  with  all  the  substance  that 
was  needed."  This  made  William  Wheelan  an  authority,  and 
his  opinion  was  quoted  all  over  the  land;  which  went  to  prove 
that  the  way  to  breed  the  trotter  was  to  get  plenty  of  running 
blood  into  his  veins.  About  this  time  the  English  running  horse 
Trustee  was  bred  on  a  famous  trotting  mare,  Fanny  Pullen,  a 
daughter  of  Winthrop  Messenger,  of  Maine,  and  the  produce  was 
the  gelding  Trustee,  the  first  to  trot  twenty  miles  within  the 
hour,  or  at  least  the  first  to  make  that  distance  regularly  and  to 
rule.  This  gave  a  tremendous  "boost"  to  running  blood,  as 
everybody  except  Hiram  Woodruff  ascribed  the  result  to  the 
great  powers  of  the  imported  running  horse.  All  subsequent  ex- 
periences fully  demonstrated  that  Hiram  Woodruff,  although 
alone,  was  right;  for  although  Trustee's  blood  commingled  more 
kindly  with  trotting  blood  than  most  of  the  other  running 
horses,  he  left  no  trotters  but  this  one.  The  highest  rate  of 


482  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

speed  of  which  this  gelding  was  capable  was  about  2:40,  and  at 
last,  in  a  race  of  mile  heats  with  some  fifth-rate  old  pelter,  at 
Cincinnati,  Ohio,  on  a  very  hot  day,  he  fell  exhausted  on  the 
track  and  died  from  the  effects  of  the  heat,  But  the  great  fame 
of  being  the  only  horse  able  to  trot  twenty  miles  within  the  hour 
did  not  long  remain  with  this  son  of  imported  Trustee.  Five 
others  have  done  the  same  thing,  viz.,  Captain  Magowan,  Con- 
troller, John  Stewart,  Mattie  Howard,  and  Lady  Fulton,  all  of 
whom  went  faster  than  Trustee,  except  Lady  Fulton. 

There  have  been  many  crucial  tests  of  the  "staying  qualities" 
of  running  blood  in  the  trotter,  as  against  the  trotter  without 
any  running  blood,  in  which  the  running  blood  has  uniformly 
been  worsted.  The  last  of  these  which  I  now  recall  was  a  match 
for  two  thousand  dollars  between  Scotland,  a  half-bred  son  of 
imported  Bonnie  Scotland,  and  Lizzie  M.,  by  Thomas  Jefferson, 
and  out  of  a  pacing  mare.  The  race  was  two-mile  heats,  best 
•three  in  five — ^a  very  unusual  race,  and  admirably  adapted  to  test 
the  staying  powers  of  the  contestants.  Scotland  was  a  fast  and 
well-seasoned  trotter;  while  the  mare  had,  probably,  a  little 
higher  flight  of  speed  she  never  had  been  tried  at  such  a  distance, 
and  in  her  breeding  she  was  short,  and  had  not  a  single  drop  of 
running  blood  in  her  inheritance.  The  mare  won  the  first  and 
second  heats  in  4:56 — 5:03,  and  the  gelding  the  third  heat  in 
4:55^,  the  fastest  in  the  race,  but  he  was  not  able  to  come  again, 
and  the  last  heat  was  won  by  the  mare  in  4:58-J.  This  race  took  place 
at  Philadelphia  in  1883,  and  if,  at  that  time,  there  still  remained 
any  advocates  of  "more  running  blood  in  the  trotter,"  they  have 
not  since  been  in  evidence,  with  two  or  three  addle-pated  excep- 
tions. 

In  looking  back  over  the  many  years  I  have  devoted  to  the  litera- 
ture of  the  horse,  and  especially  to  the  breeding  of  the  trotting 
horse,  I  can  find  no  word  in  the  English  language  that  has  been 
so  much  abused  as  the  word  "thoroughbred."  A  minister  wrote 
a  great,  pretentious  book  on  the  horse  in  which  he  maintained 
that  the  Morgan  horse  was  a  "thoroughbred."  A  lawyer  wrote 
another  pretentious  book  in  which  he  maintained  that  the  trot- 
ting horse  Dexter  was  a  "thoroughbred."  With  these  two 
shining  lights  in  the  learned  professions  writing  books  on  the 
horse  and  pronouncing  this  family  or  that  individual  "thorough- 
bred" without  knowing  the  meaning  of  the  term,  we  should  not 
deal  too  severely  with  uneducated  men  for  following  their  exam- 


HOW  THE  TROTTING   HORSE   IS   BRED.  483 

pie.  The  minister  and  the  lawyer  evidently  had  always  heard 
the  term  "thoroughbred"  applied  to  what  men  considered  the 
best,  and  when  they  were  discussing  their  favorites  which  they 
considered  the  best,  they  naturally  called  them  "thoroughbreds" 
without  knowing  what  they  were  saying.  This  was  more  than 
twenty  years  ago,  and  was  really  the  popular  conception  of  the 
meaning  of  the  term  at  that  time.  Not  one  man  in  a  thousand 
then  knew  that  the  term  had  any  other  meaning  than  the  in- 
dividual superiority  of  the  animal,  and  that  it  applied  only  to  the 
pedigree,  or  concentration  of  blood  in  the  veins  of  the  animal, 
was  quite  foreign  to  the  popular  conception.  After  the  found- 
ing of  Wallace's  Monthly  the  light  began  to  dawn  on  this  as  well 
as  on  many  other  questions,  and  to-day  the  true  meaning  of  the 
term  is  very  generally  understood. 

To  constitute  a  "thoroughbred"  of  whatever  variety  or  species 
the  animal  must  possess  a  certain  number  of  uncontaminated 
crosses  of  his  own  breed,  and  this  applies  to  all  kinds  of  domestic 
animals  that  are  bred  for  special  uses  or  qualities.  There  is  no 
law  determining  the  number  of  these  uncontaminated  crosses, 
except  the  law  of  usage.  The  cattle  men,  I  think,  were  the  first 
to  establish  a  rule  on  this  subject,  in  this  country,  and  they  did 
it  on  enlightened  and  scientific  principles.  It  was  found  in  ex- 
perience that  the  danger  of  atavism,  or  throwing  back  to  some 
undesirable  ancestor,  was  diminished  in  the  ratio  of  the  number 
of  pure  crosses  through  which  the  animal  was  descended.  At 
two  crosses  it  was  found  that  there  were  many  reversions  to  some 
type  outside  of  the  breed;  at  three  crosses  there  were  not  so 
many;  at  four  there  were  very  few,  and  at  five  reversions  had 
practically  disappeared.  While  some  required  another  cross  the 
majority  drove  the  stake  at  the  fifth  generation,  proclaiming 
thereby  that  an  animal  bred  through  five  uncontaminated  gen- 
erations of  ancestors  was  free  from  the  dangers  of  reversion,  and 
hence  was  "thoroughly  bred."  This  is  the  formula  and  this  is 
the  principle,  and  it  applies  with  equal  propriety  to  the  colt,  the 
calf,  the  pig,  the  puppy,  the  chick,  or  the  birdling.  In  this 
phrase  "thoroughly  bred"  we  have  the  origin,  reason  and  mean- 
ing of  the  term  "thoroughbred."  The  formula  of  this  rule,  if 
tabulated,  would  show  two  parents:  next,  four  grandparents; 
next  eight  great-grandparents;  next  sixteen  ancestors  and  next 
thirty-two,  making  in  all  sixty-two  ancestors,  all  of  which  must 
be  "thoroughly  bred."  This  rule  of  breeding  is  not  limited  to 


484  THE    HOUSE    OF    AMERICA. 

the  running  horse  alone,  but  applies  to  all  the  varieties  of  our 
domestic  animals;  and  whenever  the  point  is  reached  at  which 
the  danger  of  reversion  has  been  overcome  the  animal  is  "thor- 
oughly bred/7  and  the  term  "thoroughbred"  applied  just  as 
properly  to  one  kind  of  domestic  animal  as  to  another. 

The  question  here  arises  as  to  whether  the  American  Trotting 
Horse  can  be  so  thoroughly  bred  as  to  be  entitled  to  be  ranked  as 
a  thoroughbred  trotter?  This  question  is  already  affirmatively 
answered  when  we  say  the  rule  "applies  to  all  the  varieties  of 
our  domestic  animals."  This  is  the  general  fact,  but  the  trot- 
ting horse  has  a  qualification,  already  determined,  that  serves  as 
a  fixed  starting  point  in  giving  him  rank.  The  standard  as 
originally  adopted  and  honestly  administered  was  the  mighty 
engine  that  wrought  the  revolution  in  breeding  the  trotter. 
It  fixed  a  certain  qualification  that  had  to  be  complied  with  be- 
fore an  animal  could  be  admitted  to  standard  rank,  and  that 
qualification  was  in  brief  to  either  perform  or  produce  a  per- 
former that  could  cover  a  mile  in  2:30.  It  excluded  no  strains 
of  blood,  but  it  admitted  the  animals  only  that  had  fully  demon- 
strated the  ability  to  trot  or  to  produce  trotters.  The  standard 
is  now  antiquated,  and  far  behind  the  speed  of  the  trotters,  which 
is  a  clear  demonstration  of  the  wisdom  of  its  construction  and 
adoption,  but  to  this  topic  I  will  refer  at  another  place  more  at 
length.  With  the  standard,  then,  and  the  unmistakable  evidence 
it  furnished  of  the  possession  of  what  we  will  call  "trotting 
blood,"  we  have  a  more  definite  and  satisfactory  starting  point 
than  can  be  claimed  for  any  kind  or  variety  of  domestic  animal. 
With  this  demonstrated  ability  to  trot  fully  established,  we  can 
commence  to  count  the  generations  of  standard  animals  in  a  trot- 
ting pedigree,  and  if  we  find  five  generations  of  ancestors,  with 
every  animal  standard  bred,  we  can  safely  and  intelligently  say 
the  animal  is  "thoroughly  bred"  as  a  trotting  horse.  With  these 
sixty-two  progenitors  all  legally  established  as  standard  animals, 
who  will  say  this  is  not  a  thoroughbred  trotting  horse?  He  is  not 
only  thoroughbred,  but  he  is  more  distinctly  and  completely 
thoroughbred  than  any  other  domestic  animal,  because  the  fifth 
generation  of  his  ancestors,  and  the  fourth  and  the  third  and  the 
second  and  the  first  have  all  proved  that  they  are  either  trotters 
or  the  producers  of  trotters.  No  other  breed  has  ever  been 
established  on  so  good  a  foundation,  for  they  have  fairly  won 
their  initial  honors  by  what  they  have  done.  But  this  is  one 


HOW   THE   TROTTING   HORSE   IS   BRED.  485 

degree  higher  and  embraces  one  generation  more  than  the  for- 
mula usually  prescribed  as  necessary  to  constitute  the  rank  of 
thoroughbred.  Five  "generations  of  ancestors"  do  not  include 
the  representative  product  of  those  generations.  The  product 
would  be  the  sixth  generation,  which  is  one  more  than  the  gen- 
erally accepted  usage  requires.  An  animal  representing  five 
generations  of  standard  trotting  blood,  complete  and  without 
contamination,  is  "thoroughly  bred"  and  is  justly  entitled  to  be 
classified  as  a  "thoroughbred  trotting  horse."  At  this  point  of 
breeding  it  is  considered  that  the  danger  of  reversion  is  practi- 
cally eliminated,  and  hence  this  distinctive  classification.  At  the 
time  of  this  writing  (1897)  there  should  be,  in  this  country,  quite 
a  number  of  youngsters  fully  entitled  to  rank  as  thoroughbreds. 

All  intelligent  breeders  have  long  been  aiming  at  this  point, 
not  merely  for  the  name  "thoroughbred,"  but  for  the  greater 
certainty  of  uniformity  in  producing  what  they  want — the 
ability  to  perform;  and  the  quality  of  these  thoroughbred  trotters 
must  be  determined  by  the  ability  to  perform  and  the  quality  of 
each  and  every  one  of  the  ancestors.  If  each  and  every  one  of 
the  four  or  five  generations  of  ancestors  was  able  to  go  out  and 
win  himself  or  herself,  there  could  hardly  be  a  doubt  that  the 
colt  could  do  the  same,  but  some  of  those  ancestors  may  be  in  the 
standard  merely  from  reflected  honors,  which  are  good,  but  not 
a  crucial  test  of  superiority  in  the  individual.  There  is  nothing 
like  the  animal  that  "has  gone  out  and  done  it"  himself,  over 
and  over  again,  and  when  we  sit  down  to  the  study  and  compari- 
son of  pedigrees  in  the  thoroughbred  rank  we  find  great  differ- 
ences in  the  quality  of  the  lines  of  descent.  The  reflected  honors 
of  an  uncle  or  an  aunt  are  of  much  less  value  than  the  honor  of 
a  direct  ancestor.  While  the  blood  of  all  the  ancestors  is  tested 
blood,  the  individuals  may  not  all  have  been  tested,  and  hence 
are  less  certain  in  transmitting  the  true  trotting  instinct.  While 
the  standard  has  done  wonders  in  teaching  the  true  art  of  breed- 
ing, like  all  other  human  devices  it  has  its  imperfections.  Jnst 
like  the  runner,  the  trotter  may  be  strictly  thoroughbred,  and 
yet  in  taking  after  some  of  the  imperfections  of  one  or  more  of 
his  ancestors,  he  may  be  of  bat  little  value  as  a  performer.  This 
truth  has  been  verified  in  a  thousand  experiences  in  the  runner,  and 
it  is  just  as  liable  to  be  verified  in  the  trotter.  Hence  the  supreme 
importance  of  looking  well  to  the  qualities  and  capacities  of 
every  animal  in  the  inheritance. 


486  THE    HOESE    OF    AMEBICA. 

At  the  very  inception  of  the  idea  that  the  trotting  horse  could 
be  bred  and  developed  into  a  breed,  an  opinion  prevailed  every- 
where that  it  could  not  be  done.  The  theory  that  speed  at  the 
trot  came  from  speed  at  the  gallop  was  universally  held  and 
advocated.  In  1868  I  made  a  tour  among  the  breeders  and 
horsemen  of  Tennessee  and  Kentucky,  for  the  purpose  of  gather- 
ing information  about  both  runners  and  trotters.  Those  States 
were  then  beginning  to  pull  themselves  together  after  the  war. 
At  General  Harding's,  among  others,  I  was  shown  a  large,  heavy- 
boned  colt,  and  the  General  remarked  that  if  he  did  not  make  a 
race  horse  he  would  make  a  capital  stallion  to  take  to  the  West 
and  breed  on  trotting  mares.  At  Balie  Peyton's  I  was  shown  a. 
great  big,  coarse  horse  that  had  run  some  races  and  won  in  very 
slow  time,  and  that  was  unsound  at  many  points.  He  was  over 
sixteen  hands  high,  and  had  very  bad  limbs.  Mr.  Peyton  re- 
marked that  "he  was  too  big  for  a  race  horse,  but  he  would  do 
well  in  the  West  as  a  trotting  sire."  This  was  the  remark  every- 
where as  applied  to  big  colts  that  couldn't  run.  About  the  same 
time  Mr.  Joseph  Cairn  Simpson,  then  in  the  employ  of  a  sport- 
ing paper  in  New  York,  as  an  editorial  writer,  expressed  his 
sorrow  that  Hambletonian  did  not  have  a  thoroughbred  cross, 
close  up,  and  his  opinion  that  such  a  cross  would  have  made  him 
a  much  greater  sire.  Thus,  East  and  West,  North  and  South,  the 
opinion  prevailed  everywhere  that  the  way  to  breed  the  trotter  was 
to  go  to  the  runner.  This  universal  belief,  wholly  without  founda- 
tion, soon  generated  the  cry,  "more  running  blood  in  the  trotter," 
and  the  instincts  of  all  the  rogues  in  the  country  were  quickened  to 
make  their  pedigrees  conform  to  the  popular  belief  of  what  was  best. 
This  resulted  in  a  period  of  fictitious  claims,  for  when  a  man  had  a 
colt  out  of  a  mare  of  unknown  breeding  the  rule  was  to  say,  "dam 
thoroughbred,"  and  if  the  owner  was  unusually  conscientious 
and  knew  the  breeding  for  one  or  two  crosses,  he  would  give  them 
correctly,  but  seldom  failed  to  tack  on  two  or  three  thoroughbred 
crosses  that  were  wholly  fictitious.  After  all  my  years  of  experi- 
ence with  the  pedigrees  of  horses,  it  is  my  deliberate  and  candid 
opinion  that  no  word  in  the  English  language  has  been  so  much 
abused  as  the  word  "thoroughbred."  It  has  been  the  medium 
of  more  deceptions  and  downright  falsehoods  than  any  other 
word  in  the  vocabulary.  For  many  years  it  was  the  word  above 
all  other  words  that  the  unscrupulous  jockey  employed  to  defraud 
his  inexperienced  victim.  And  if  there  had  been  no  strong  hand 


HOW    THE   TROTTING    HORSE    IS   BRED.  487 

to  take  the  improper  and  dishonest  use  of  the  word  by  the  throat 
there  would  be  no  breed  of  trotters,  and  the  whole  business  of 
breeding  and  developing  the  trotting  horse  would  be  to-day  just 
where  it  was  thirty  years  ago.  The  old,  threadbare  stock  argu- 
ment was  iu  everybody's  mouth,  to  the  effect  that  "Messenger 
was  an  English  thoroughbred  and  he  founded  a  family  of  trotters, 
hence  any  other  English  thoroughbred  could  do  the  same  thing 
under  the  same  circumstances."  When  this  ancient  formula 
was  submitted  to  the  test  it  was  found  to  be  fatally  unsound  at 
both  ends,  as  has.  been  shown  in  another  chapter.  Messenger 
was  found  to  be  far  short  of  being  thoroughbred  in  his  inherit- 
ance; forty  other  English  thoroughbreds  had  been  in  competition 
with  him  and  bred  upon  the  same  mares,  yet  no  other  English 
thoroughbred,  in  the  experiences  of  a  hundred  and  fifty  years, 
ever  founded  a  family  of  trotters.  The  two  ablest  advocates  of 
"more  running  blood  in  the  trotter"  that  this  country  has  pro- 
duced, Mr.  Charles  J.  Foster  and  Mr.  Joseph  Cairn  Simpson,  when 
challenged  to  produce  an  English  thoroughbred  horse  that  had 
founded  a  family  of  trotters,  conceded  the  whole  contention  by 
naming  Bishop's  Hambletonian  and  Mambrino,  both  sons  of 
Messenger  and  the  principal  channels  through  which  Messenger 
had  founded  his  family  of  trotters.  This  knocked  all  the  noise 
out  of  the  famous  formula,  and  instead  of  the  braying  of  an  ass 
we  have  heard  nothing  since  on  this  subject  but  an  occasional 
and  very  feeble  squeak  of  a  mouse. 

In  the  earlier  portion  of  the  period  when  the  American  Trotter 
was  beginning  to  assume  the  shape  and  character  of  a  breed,  the 
term  "thoroughbred,"  meaning  English  racing  blood,  was  ad- 
hered to  with  astonishing  tenacity,  as  an  indispensable  element 
in  the  breeding  of  the  trotter.  A  few  men  of  clear  and  independ- 
ent minds  commenced  to  study  the  question  in  the  light  of  ex- 
periences, and  they  were  not  long  in  reaching  the  truth;  but,  as  a 
rule,  the  less  a  man  knew  of  the  question,  whether  a  breeder  or 
a  writer,  the  more  blatant  and  vociferous  he  was  in  maintaining 
that  all  trotters  were  dependent  for  their  speed  on  the  blood  of 
the  "thoroughbred  English  race  horse."  When  Maud  S.  made 
her  four-year-old  record  and  astonished  the  world,  the  acclama- 
tions of  this  class  went  up  in  tremendous  volume  pointing  to  the 
Boston  blood  of  her  grandam  as  the  element  that  did  it.  !Srow, 
it  never  has  been  shown,  and  it  never  carv  be  shown,  that  there 
was  a  single  drop  of  Boston's  blood  in  her  veins.  Besides  all 


488  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

this,  Boston  was  not  a  thoroughbred  horse,  for  neither  his  sire 
nor  his  grandam  was  thoroughbred.  A  curious  phase  of  the  in- 
terest attached  to  the  mere  word  "thoroughbred"  was  brought 
out  by  a  Catholic  priest,  in  New  Jersey,  in  a  very  cranky  and 
ill-natured  letter  addressed  to  the  editor  of  Wallace's  Monthly 
protesting  against  the  frequent  use  of  the  term  "running-bred" 
instead  of  "thoroughbred."  Priests  are  generally  educated  men, 
but  this  poor  man  struck  out  into  a  field  where  he  was  entirely  ig- 
norant. A  horse  with  two  or  three  immediate  and  direct  running 
crosses  may  be  properly  and  truthfully  called,  "running  bred," 
because  that  blood  predominates  in  his  veins,  but  to  be  justly 
and  truthfully  called  "thoroughly  bred"  he  must  have  at  least 
five  direct  and  distinct  crosses,  and  each  and  every  one  of  them 
pure  and  without  any  contamination  from  any  other  blood.  As 
an  illustration  of  what  results  from  this  definition  of  the  word 
"thoroughbred,"  we  may  take  the  very  cream  of  our  old  Ameri- 
can racing  families  and  not  one  in  fifty  is  "thoroughly  bred." 
American  Eclipse  was  far  short  of  being  thoroughbred,  even  if 
we  admit  that  Messenger  was  thoroughbred.  Timoleon,  the 
greatest  son  of  Sir  Archy,  had  an  impossible  and  untruthful 
pedigree  on  the  side  of  his  dam.  His  great  son  Boston  was  short 
and  deficient  on  both  sides,  and  with  these  taints  how  could  he 
get  the  great  blind  horse  Lexington  and  make  him  a  thorough- 
bred? These  horses  were  distinctively  "running  bred,"  but  not 
technically  "thoroughbred."  It  is  not  to  be  presumed  the  priest 
was  angry  because  I  preferred  not  to  use  a  word  that  conveyed 
an  untruth  and  to  use  one  that  told  the  exact  truth,  for  he  was 
not  qualified  to  judge  which  was  true  and  which  was  not  true, 
but  like  hundreds  of  others  he  feared  the  value  of  his  property 
might  be  affected  by  the  refusal  to  apply  the  term  "thorough- 
bred" to  some  supposable  cross  in  some  of  his  pedigrees. 

"More  running  blood  in  the  trotter"  was  a  "fad"  that  has 
been  completely  extinguished  by  all  the  experiences  of  later  years. 
It  was  a  freak  that  never  had  any  foundation  either  in  nature  or 
in  reason.  No  animal  can  transmit  to  his  posterity  qualities  and 
capacities  which  he  has  not  inherited,  or  which  he  does  not 
possess  by  acquirement.  This  is  a  rule  which  seems  to  be  per- 
fectly plain  to  the  comprehension  of  everybody,  and  in  observa- 
tion and  experience  it  proves  itself  true  every  day  of  the  year. 
To  breed  a  horse  that  can  go  fast  at  the  trotting  or  pacing  gait 
we  must  go  to  the  horse  and  the  blood  that  has  gone  fast  at  one  or 


HOW    THE   TROTTIXG    HORSE    IS    BRED.  489 

the  other  of  these  gaits.  It  seems  like  a  needless  work  to 
expend  any  time  or  space  on  what  is  self-evident  in  all  human  ex- 
periences. A  few  years  ago  I  offered  a  money  reward,  of  sufficient 
amount  to  justify  some  labor  in  a  search,  to  any  one  who  would 
report  to  me  any  thoroughbred  running  horse,  with  the  proofs, 
that  had  ever  made  a  trotting  record  of  a  mile  in  three  minutes, 
and  there  was  no  response.  Some  years  later  I  renewed  the 
offer,  doubling  the  amount  of  the  former  offer,  and  still  there 
came  no  response.  I  regret  now  that  I  did  not  make  the  offer 
for  a  mile  in  four  minutes  instead  of  three,  for  I  very  much 
doubt  whether  there  ever  was  a  thoroughbred  horse  able  to  trot 
a  mile  in  four  minutes.  What  is  the  use,  then,  of  giving  further 
attention  to  the  consideration  of  the  value  of  thoroughbred  run- 
ning blood  in  the  trotter? 

But  after  conceding  that  the  instinct  to  stick  to  the  trot  and 
the  step  of  the  trotter  must  come  from  the  trotter,  the  advocates 
of  "more  running  blood  in  the  trotter"  plant  all  their  heavy 
guns  on  the  proposition  that  running  blood  is  needed  to  give  the 
trotter  more  courage,  endurance,  and  beauty  of  form.  In  all 
the  past  years  we  have  had  so  many  grand  panegyrics  on  the  will 
power  and  undying  courage  of  the  "courser  of  the  desert"  that 
they  have  become  threadbare  and  have  an  "ancient  and  fish-like 
smell,"  and  we  would  prefer  to  exchange  them  for  something 
more  recent  and  practical.  When  we  go  to  a  race  meeting  and 
see  so  many  contests  at  various  distances  less  than  a  mile,  a  few  at 
something  over  a  mile,  and  all  these  merely  single  dashes,  we 
naturally  and  justly  conclude  that  the  distance  of  ground  to  be 
covered  in  each  contest  is  adjusted  to  the  courage  and  stamina 
of  the  racers.  I  cannot  conceive  of  any  fairer  criterion  by  which 
to  determine  the  measure  of  gameness  and  pluck  of  running 
horses  than  simply  to  consider  the  distance  chosen,  and  that  for  a 
single  dash.  Trainers  and  owners  know  just  where  each  horse  will 
quit,  if  hard  pressed,  and  they  will  not  enter  him  in  any  distance 
beyond  the  point  where  they  know  his  courage  will  fail.  With 
the  data  of  distances  for  these  single  dashes  already  fixed  for 
the  accommodation  of  horses  with  different  degrees  of  staying 
qualities,  and  after  making  a  liberal  allowance  for  age  and  lack 
of  condition,  we  seem  to  have  a  solid  foundation  for  a  safe  con- 
clusion that  the  crucial  test  of  the  speed  of  the  average  race 
horse  fails  him  before  he  reaches  the  first  mile-post. 

When  the  trotter  starts  out  for  his  summer's  campaign  he  has  no 


490  THE   HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

choice  as  to  the  length  of  his  races,  and  he  is  not  looking  about  for 
single  dashes  of  four,  five,  six  or  seven  furlongs,  but  enters  the  field 
boldly  and  throws  down  the  glove  to  all  the  best  strains  of  trot- 
ting and  pacing  blood.  Every  race  will  be  mile  heats,  best  two 
in  three  or  three  in  five,  and  it  often  requires  six,  seven  or  eight 
heats  before  the  victor  is  declared.  This  experience  is  repeated, 
week  after  week,  during  the  whole  season.  Such  a  weekly  ex- 
perience as  this,  continued  through  twenty  consecutive  weeks, 
would  probably  destroy  the  best  and  stoutest  running  horse  now 
living.  This  is  the  test  to  which  the  trotter  is  subjected,  and 
no  man  can  say  it  lacks  in  severity  in  determining  his  qualities 
as  a  race  horse,  in  his  stamina,  his  courage  and  his  gameness. 
In  touching  this  point  I  will  here  take  the  liberty  of  entering  my 
protest  against  what  I  consider  the  unnecessary  severity  of  this 
test.  We  want  all  these  tests,  and  from  the  standpoint  of  the 
breeder  we  cannot  progress  without  them,  but  we  want  them  to 
stop  short  of  injury  to  the  animal.  When  a  contest  is  drawn  out 
to  six,  eight  or  ten  heats,  it  not  only  becomes  cruel  as  a  sport, 
but  it  is  liable  to  inflict  irreparable  injury  to  the  soundness  of 
the  animal.  Unsoundness,  either  external  or  internal,  is  liable  to 
result  from  all  such  abuses.  This  is  a  dominant  fact,  and  while 
we  may  not  be  able  to  see  the  injury  with  the  eye,  we  are  likely 
to  see  the  evil  results  in  the  progeny.  Animals  of  the  kind  most 
likely  to  be  subjected  to  this  over-severity  of  test  are  the  hope 
of  the  future  as  producers,  and  by  all  means  wise  and  possible  we 
should  seek  to  preserve  them  in  their  pristine  soundness  and 
vigor.  As  breeders  we  cannot  afford  to  let  them  go  without 
development  and  test,  neither  can  we  aiford  to  impair  or  destroy 
their  producing  qualities,  in  the  test.  This  can  be  done  only  by 
shortening  the  race;  not  the  distance  of  ground,  but  the  number 
of  heats  that  can  be  trotted.  With  an  inflexible  rule  that  not 
more  than  five  heats  should  be  trotted  in  any  race,  and  that  at 
the  conclusion  of  the  fifth  heat  the  money  should  be  divided  ac- 
cording to  ths  places  of  the  contestants,  I  would  not  be  particular 
as  to  whether  the  race  was  for  the  best  two  in  three,  or  the  best 
three  in  five.  The  invariable  results  have  been  that  in  long- 
drawn-out  contests  of  many  heats  there  have  been  bargains  and 
combinations  for  or  against  certain  horses,  and  all  managed  by 
and  in  the  interest  of  the  so-called  "speculators."  If  this  were 
done  the  combinations  of  the  gamblers  would  be  checkmated, 
the  cruelty  of  the  sport  would  be  eliminated,  and  our  best  horses 


HOW   THE   TROTTING    HORSE    IS    BRED.  491 

would  come  through  the  campaigns  ready  and  fit  to  propagate 
their  species. 

In  breeding  for  a  particular  purpose  or  qualification  all  experi- 
ence goes  to  show  that  the  elements  entering  into  the  new  crea- 
ture must  be  carefully  selected  as  possessing  the  quality  that  we 
seek  to  propagate.  Nobody  would  think  of  breeding  a  running 
mare  to  a  trotting  horse  if  he  was  seeking  to  breed  a  running 
colt.  No  thoughtful  and  intelligent  man  would  think  of  breed- 
ing a  running  horse  upon  a  trotting  mare  if  he  were  seeking  to 
breed  a  trotting  colt.  The  runner  to  the  runner  and  the  trotter 
to  the  trotter  has  been  demonstrated  ten  thousand  times  as  the 
right  way.  The  cross-bred  or  half-and-half-bred  animal  may  be 
something  of  a  trotter  or  something  of  a  runner,  doing  neither 
well;  and  this  uncertainty  never  can  become  a  certainty  as  to 
which  it  may  be  till  you  try  him.  The  evil  of  half-and-half 
breeding  does  not  cease  with  the  life  of  the  animal,  for  the  divi- 
sion in  his  own  inheritance  will  manifest  itself  in  his  progeny  for 
generations,  or  till  it  is  bred  out.  But,  strange  as  it  may  seem, 
there  are  still  a  few  old  men  living  who,  from  pride  of  opinion  ad- 
vanced in  their  younger  days,  still  maintain  that  trotting  speed 
must  come  from  the  "thoroughbred"  and  "point  with  pride"  to  the 
great  horse  Palo  Alto  as  the  complete  illustration  of  their  belief. 
In  relation  to  the  breeding  of  Palo  Alto  I  will  here  tell  a  little 
story,  premising  that  I  neither  accept  it  as  true  nor  reject  it  as 
false,  for  I  know  nothing  about  it.  The  late  Mr.  William  H. 
Wilson,  of  Cynthiana,  Kentucky,  was  in  many  respects  a  remark- 
able man.  He  was  full  of  energy  and  push,  and  his  brain  seemed 
to  teem  with  formidable  ideas,  chiefly  relating  to  his  prospects, 
and  the  management  of  his  own  business.  He  was  intelligent  in 
horse  matters,  and  very  well  informed  on  local  horse  history.  He 
did  a  great  deal  of  work  for  me  in  the  way  of  straightening  out 
tangled  skeins,  and  in  tracing  obscure  pedigrsss.  In  this  way  I 
came  to  know  Mr.  Wilson  very  well,  and  as  I  never  found  him 
wrong  on  these  questions  I  came  to  place  great  confidence  in  his 
word  and  his  judgment  in  all  pedigree  matters  that  he  had  in- 
vestigated. Some  time  about  1889,  probably,  he  asked  me  to  in- 
vestigate the  pedigree  of  Dame  Winnie,  the  dam  of  Palo  Alto, 
for,  he  said,  he  had  every  reason  to  believe  she  was  not  by  Planet, 
but  by  a  trotting-bred  horse  that  he  named,  but  that  name  has 
escaped  me.  I  replied  that  I  had  not  time  then,  but  I  would 
think  about  it.  Some  months  afterward  he  was  again  in  my 


492  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

office  and  he  again  urged  the  investigation.  My  reply  was  that 
there  were  some  very  upright  and  honest  men  in  Kentucky  as< 
well  as  some  great  rogues,  and  if  I  were  to  undertake  to  investi- 
gate this  pedigree  the  rogues  could  get  forty  men,  if  so  many 
were  necessary,  for  a  bottle  of  whisky  or  a  half-dollar  a  head, 
who  could  remember  just  what  it  was  necessary  to  remember, 
and  forget  just  what  it  was  necessary  to  forget  in  order  to  prove 
that  the  mare  was  by  Planet.  I  recalled  my  experience  with 
suborned  evidence  in  the  past,  and  knew  just  what  I  might 
expect  in  the  future,  and  so  I  had  concluded  to  make  no  more 
investigations  in  certain  portions  of  Kentucky  until  I  had  an 
opportunity  to  cross-examine  the  witnesses.  Dame  Winnie  was, 
a  plain,  common-looking  mare,  with  nothing  about  her  to  indi- 
cate high  breeding,  and  if  we  lay  aside  Mr.  Wilson's  story  and 
accept  the  pedigree  as  usually  given  she  was  strongly  running 
bred,  but  at  several  points  in  her  pedigree  she  fails  of  being  thor- 
oughbred. The  internal  evidence  as  to  the  breeding  of  this 
mare,  brought  to  light  in  the  performance  of  her  produce,  sug- 
gests very  strongly  the  probability  that  she  possessed  some  trot- 
ting blood,  from  some  source  not  far  removed.  She  has  five 
representatives  in  the  2:30  list,  and  this  of  itself  strongly  supports 
Mr.  Wilson's  untold  story,  that  I  would  not  listen  to.  In  passing 
I  will  say  I  would  be  glad  to  listen  to  it  now;  for  this  solid 
foundation  of  experience  is  so  stoutly  corroborative  of  what  he 
suggested  as  to  justify  an  effort  to  reach  the  exact  truth.  When 
it  was  known  in  Kentucky  that  Senator  Stanford  had  sent  his- 
representative  down  there  to  gather  up  a  lot  of  "thoroughbred" 
mares  from  which  to  breed  trotters  in  California,  every  dealer  in 
the  State  had  just  what  he  wanted.  He  was  looking  for  pedi- 
grees, and  it  was  a  very  easy  matter  to  shape  up  the  pedigrees, 
just  to  suit  him. 

Whatever  may  have  been  the  breeding  of  his  dam,  Palo  Alto 
was  a  great  horse,  but  he  came  to  his  speed  slowly,  and  this 
would  seem  to  indicate  that  if  his  dam  had  any  trotting  inherit- 
ance it  was  weak  in  the  direction  of  attaining  a  high  rate  of 
sr>eed.  From  the  day  he  was  weaned  till  the  day  he  died  he  was 
Senator  Stanford's  idol,  and  with  this  horse  as  an  object  lesson 
he  was  going  to  teach  the  world  how  to  breed  the  trotter.  At 
two  years  old  he  was  driven  a  mile  privately  in  2:22f,  and  his 
owner,  feeling  that  his  dream  was  realized  in  breeding  the  great- 
est horse  the  world  had  produced,  named  him  "Palo  Alto,"  as> 


HOW   THE  TROTTING   HOKSE   IS   BRED.  493 

lie  deemed  him  worthy  of  being  at  the  head  of  the  greatest  breed- 
ing  establishment  of  the  world.  He  was  in  the  hands  of  the 
most  skillful  and  careful  of  all  trainers,  and  the  training  went 
on  without  respite,  year  after  year.  When  four  years  old  he 
went  through  the  Eastern  circuits,  winning  the  larger  share  of 
his  purses,  and  making  a  record  of  2:20J.  Now  let  us  consider 
for  a  moment  whether  the  Senator  did  not  make  a  great  mistake 
and  select  the  wrong  horse  as  the  typical  representative  of  his 
great  establishment.  In  1888  he  bred  a  colt  by  Electioneer  out 
of  Lula  Wilkes,  grandam  the  famous  trotting  mare  Lula,  2:15, 
by  Norman,  etc.,  intensely  trotting  bred,  and  when  he  was  three 
years  old  he  made  a  record  of  2:16.  This  is  better  than  2:20£  as 
a  four-year-old,  for  this  fellow  had  not  to  take  one-half  the  train- 
ing that  Palo  Alto  was  subjected  to.  The  next  year  he  bred  another 
colt  by  Electioneer  called  Arion,  out  of  a  mare  by  Nutwood;  she 
out  of  a  sister  to  Voltaire,  2:20^,  by  Tattler,  2:26;  and  she  out  of 
the  famous  trotting  brood  mare  Young  Portia,  by  Mambrino 
Chief;  and  the  next  dam  Portia  by  the  pacer  Eoebuck. 
This  colt  came  out  and  trotted  a  mile  in  2:10f  as  a  two-year-old. 
The  four-year-old  had  a  great  "boom"  and  was  considered  by 
many  as  the  phenomenal  colt  of  his  year,  but  when  we  place  his 
record  of  2:20J  beside  the  2:16  of  the  three-year-old,  it  looks 
Tery  sickly,  and  when  we  compare  it  with  the  2:10f  of  the  two- 
year-old  it  is  shaded  into  a  deathly  pallor.  The  four-year-old  is 
largely  the  result  of  skill  and  art;  the  two-year-old  is  the  result 
of  nature.  Arion  is  the  best  horse,  by  the  record,  that  the  world 
has  ever  produced,  and  the  Senator  was  mistaken  in  his  dream. 
We  must  judge  of  the  value  of  a  fast  performance  by  the  degree 
of  naturalness  which  it  represents  and  the  measure  of  its  freedom 
from  the  arts  of  the  trainer.  The  "born  trotter"  is  what  we 
want,  and  at  two  years  old  Arion,  or  any  other  colt,  was  at  the 
right  age  to  determine  whether  a  fast  performance  was  the  result 
of  nature  or  of  art. 

It  is  a  fact  well  known  to  everybody  that  some  trotting-bred 
stallions  have  shown  greater  power  in  controlling  the  action  of 
their  progeny  than  others  that  seemed  to  be  equally  well  bred. 
If  out  of  the  great  mass  of  stallions,  past  and  present,  that  have 
been  more  or  less  successful  as  trotting  progenitors,  we  pick  out 
thirty  of  the  very  best,  as  shown  by  their  progeny,  it  will  proba- 
bly surprise  many  of  my  readers  to  learn  that  only  three  of  that 
number  have  been  able  to  triumph  in  the  supreme  test  of  getting 


494  THE   HORSE   OF   AMEKICA. 

trotters  out  of  running-bred  mares.  Of  these  three  Electioneer 
stands  first,  Almont  second,  and  Pilot  Jr.  third.  After  mak- 
ing all  allowance  for  the  anxiety  of  certain  Californians  and  cer- 
tain Kentuckians  to  prove  the  need  of  "more  running  blood  in 
the  trotter,"  and  their  manifest  willingness  to  help  along  with 
pedigrees  in  that  direction,  I  am  fully  convinced  that  these  three 
horses,  in  some  cases,  were  able  to  meet  and  overcome  the  hostile 
elements  of  the  galloper.  Not  in  every  case,  certainly,  nor  in  a 
majority  of  cases.  When  Senator  Stanford  was  showing  me  the 
step  of  Palo  Alto,  on  his  own  track,  as  a  three-year-old,  I  re- 
marked, "Well,  Electioneer  certainly  triumphed  in  that  case," 
and  the  Senator  replied,  "Yes,  but  none  of  my  other  stallions 
can  do  it,  and  there  are  some  thoroughbred  mares  upon  which 
Electioneer  can't  do  it."  When  approached  by  others  on  this 
subject  in  the  riper  years  of  his  experience,  he  was  in  the  habit 
of  replying:  "There  are  thoroughbreds  and  thoroughbreds;  some 
of  them  will  produce  trotters  to  Electioneer,  and  some  will  not." 
He  accepted  everything  as  thoroughbred  that  had  been  bought 
by  his  agents  as  thoroughbred,  whether  in  Kentucky  or  Cali- 
fornia, and  he  claimed  to  be  able  to  pick  out  those  that  would 
produce  trotters  by  their  appearance.  When  pressed  to  give  the 
characteristics  by  which  he  was  able  to  make  his  selections,  he 
spoke  of  the  shape  of  the  animal,  in  a  general  way,  and  especially 
by  the  head  and  the  expression  of  countenance.  In  selecting  his 
mares  to  put  in  the  trotting  stud  by  their  "appearance"  he 
would  naturally  select  such  as  had  the  "appearance"  of  trot- 
ters, and  as  he  personally  knew  no  more  about  their  pedigrees  or 
the  inheritance  of  the  animals  than  the  mares  knew  themselves, 
he  was  very  liable  to  be  deceived  in  the  breeding  of  the  animals 
as  he  selected  them.  In  selecting  a  mare  by  "appearance"  as 
indicating  that  she  might  throw  trotters  to  Electioneer,  there  is 
a  strong  suggestion  that  this  "appearance"  may  have  been  a 
legitimate  "inheritance"  sought  to  be  covered  up  by  that  sadly 
abused  term  "thoroughbred."  Whether  this  suggestion  ever 
entered  the  Senator's  mind  I  have  no  means  of  determining. 
But  whether  some  of  the  mares  called  "thoroughbred"  had  really 
a  mixed  inheritance  or  not,  the  fact  remains  that  the  three  horses 
named  above  did  succeed  in  getting  some  trotters  from  mares 
that  were  strongly  running  bred.  Then  the  question  arises:  Why 
did  these  three  horses  succeed  where  all  others  failed?  We  are 
not  able  to  give  an  answer  to  this  question  that  is  complete  and 


HOW   THE   TROTTING   HORSE   IS   BRED.  495 

irrefutable,  for  there  is  so  much  in  the  laws  of  generation  that 
we  do  not  and  cannot  know.  Take  two  brothers,  for  example, 
and  one  is  a  great  success  and  the  other  a  great  failure,  and 
often  the  failure  is  the  better  formed  and  the  better  looking 
horse  of  the  two.  All  that  science  teaches  us  here  is  that  one 
took  after  some  ancestor,  near  or  remote,  that  was  good,  and  the 
other  after  some  ancestor  that  was  not  good.  Electioneer,  Al- 
mont  and  Pilot  Jr.  all  had  short  pedigrees  composed  exclusively 
of  trotting  and  pacing  blood,  except  possibly  a  few  drops  of  run- 
ning blood  that  may  have  trickled  down  from  the  runner  through 
trotting  or  pacing  channels.  Their  instincts  to  stick  to  the  trot 
had  been  encouraged  and  more  or  less  completely  developed. 
Electioneer  and  Almont  both  had  pacing  blood  some  distance 
away,  and  Pilot  Jr.,  so  far  as  we  know,  had  nothing  but  pacing 
blood,  and  yet  he  never  paced  a  step  in  his  life.  This  embraces 
all  we  know  of  the  three  horses  that  proved  themselves  the  most 
prepotent  in  overcoming  all  antagonisms  of  race  or  blood.  Others 
equally  great,  no  doubt,  have  come  up  since  their  day,  but  as 
breeding  is  now  better  understood  and  as  the  laws  of  nature  are 
now  more  carefully  followed,  tests  of  this  kind  are  not  often 
made. 

After  all  the  "wiring  in  and  wiring  out"  of  the  tortuous  advo- 
cates of  "more  running  blood  in  the  trotter"  had  found  that 
their  efforts  had  borne  no  fruit  and  that  all  intelligent  breeders 
had  left  their  theories  away  behind,  a  remarkably  brilliant  genius 
struck  out  a  new  line  of  thought  and  argument,  which  unfor- 
tunately died  "a  bornin'  "  just  as  the  attention  of  all  intelligent 
breeders  was  turning  away  from  "more  running  blood  in  the 
trotter"  as  a  senseless  "fad,"  and  looking  to  the  pacer  as  a  possi- 
ble source  of  increased  trotting  speed.  In  formulating  and  ex- 
ploiting his  idea,  our  genius  seems  to  have  reasoned  after  this 
manner:  "The  crisis  is  here,  the  breeders  are  all  turning  away 
from  the  thoroughbred  as  a  source  of  trotting  speed  and  consid- 
ering the  pacer,  and  now  if  I  can  convince  them  that  the  pacer  is 
at  least  half-thoroughbred  I  will  beat  the  standard  and  win  the 
day."  Here  we  have  the  motive  and  the  subject,  and  now  we  are 
ready  for  the  manipulation.  In  due  time  the  article  appeared, 
and  I  must  do  the  writer  the  justice  of  saying  I  never  have  been 
fully  satisfied  that  he  believed  a  single  word  of  it  himself.  He 
starts  out  to  show  that  the  pace  is  not  the  result  of  hereditary 
transmission  but  the  result  of  "structural  incongruity."  He 


496  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

declared  that  this  "structural  incongruity"  is  the  result  of 
breeding  the  thoroughbred  horse  on  the  slab-sided,  ill-shapen 
mares  of  the  West  and  Southwest.  From  the  inheritance,  part 
of  the  animal  is  structurally  formed  to  run  and  the  other  part 
structurally  formed  to  trot,  and  between  the  two  a  compromise 
is  made  on  the  pace.  In  this  "structural  incongruity,"  between 
the  two  parts  the  pacing  gait  originated,  and  hence  whatever 
speed  the  pacer  may  possess  comes  from  the  "thoroughbred;" 
and,  therefore,  of  necessity,  whatever  speed  the  trotter  gets  from 
the  pacer  comes  from  the  "thoroughbred."  There  are  many 
humbugs  in  the  literature  of  the  horse,  but  this  is  the  craziest 
humbug  I  have  ever  met  with.  What  a  pity  he  left  his  work  un- 
finished, and  failed  to  tell  us  which  end  of  the  horse  was  running 
bred  and  which  end  trotting  bred,  so  that  we  might  locate  the 
"incongruity"  and  cut  it  out!  But  to  look  at  this  "structural 
incongruity"  seriously,  it  lacks  but  little  of  a  scandal  on  the  in- 
telligence and  honesty  of  American  writers  on  the  horse.  Here  is 
a  gentleman  of  reputed  intelligence,  who  wields  a  facile  pen  and 
has  been  writing  on  breeding  subjects  for  about  thirty  years,  and 
much  of  his  work  was  well  done;  and  now  at  the  close  of  the 
nineteenth  century  he  undertakes  to  tell  us  how  the  pacer  orig- 
inated in  this  country.  The  veriest  tyro  in  horse  history  knows 
that  pacers  abounded  in  England  in  the  twelfth  century,  and 
indeed  long  before  that.  Every  colony  in  this  country  was  full 
of  pacers  a  hundred  years  before  the  first  thoroughbred  crossed 
the  Atlantic.  But  wild  and  absurd  theories  can  safely  be  left  to 
the  public  judgment. 

It  required  several  years  of  labor  and  iteration  to  convince  the 
breeding  public  that  the  trot  and  the  pace  were  simply  two  forms 
of  one  and  the  same  gait.  When  first  advanced  it  was  received 
by  the  more  intelligent  breeders  as  an  abstraction  that  had  noth- 
ing practical  in  it,  while  those  of  less  ability  to  think  for  them- 
selves only  laughed  at  it.  Since  then  the  inevitable  processes  of 
experience  have  demonstrated  its  truth,  and  the  question  of  to- 
day is  how  to  separate  these  two  forms  of  the  same  gait  and  to 
breed  either  form,  as  we  may  desire,  as  a  distinct  and  certainly 
transmissible  gait.  With  a  few  it  will  still  remain  a  matter  of 
indifference  whether  the  colt  comes  a  pacer  or  a  trotter,  but  witL 
the  great  mass  of  breeders  the  question  of  profit  in  breeding  the 
harness  horse  must  be  considered.  Everybody  knows  that  in  the 
market  for  road  horses  the  clean-stepping  trotter  is  worth  more 


EOW  THE  TROTTING   HORSE   IS   BRED.  497 

than  the  smooth-gliding  pacer.  This  is  not  a  question  to  be  de-  / 
termined  by  fashion,  but  a  fact  of  universal  experience  that  the 
trotting  action  is  better  suited  to  harness  and  the  pacing  action 
better  suited  to  the  saddle.  Fashions  may  change,  but  these  two 
facts  are  unchangeable,  for  they  are  founded  in  the  nature  and 
mechanism  of  the  two  forms  of  action.  The  difficulties  in  the 
way  of  separating  the  diagonal  from  the  lateral  form  of  the  trot 
are  very  great,  and  there  is  no  use  or  wisdom  in  attempting  to 
blink  this  fact.  Speed  at  both  forms  of  the  gait  comes  from  the 
same  source,  the  same  blood,  the  same  inheritance;  and  source, 
blood  and  inheritance,  in  a  breeding  sense,  are  the  hardest  things 
in  nature  to  overcome.  So  far  as  experience  teaches  there  is  but 
one  method  or  treatment  that  has  ever  been  successful  in  wiping 
out  the  pacer.  In  the  first  half  of  the  seventeenth  century  Eng- 
land was  full  of  pacers,  and  about  a  hundred  years  later  she  did 
not  have  one.  The  trouble  about  this  remedy  is  that  the  trotters 
were  wiped  out  also,  and  to-day  England  has  neither  a  pacer  nor 
a  trotter.  When  she  now  wants  a  trotter  she  has  to  send  to  this 
country  and  get  some  of  the  blood  of  the  little  despised  pacer 
that  was  shipped  from  her  own  shores  in  the  early  colonial  days. 
The  blood  of  the  Saracenic  horse  has  not  lost  its  potency  as  a 
pacing  expunger,  as  shown  by  modern  experiments,  and  all  our 
breeders  have  to  do  is  to  use  it  in  copious  effusions,  and  we  will 
soon  be  rid  of  the  pacer,  and  the  trotter  along  with  him.  The 
pacer  and  the  trotter  are  never  found  separate  from  each  other, 
so  far  as  my  information  goes.  In  Russia  they  breed  trotters 
methodically,  and  they  have  a  full  supply  of  very  fast  pacers 
that  are  used  as  shaft  horses  in  their  droskies.  As  in  the  past, 
so  in  the  future,  we  never  need  expect  to  see  the  two  forms  of 
the  gait  entirely  separated. 

Our  people,  however,  are  not  ready,  and  as  long  as  the  horse  is 
used  for  business  and  pleasure  never  will  be  ready  to  dispense 
with  the  trotter;  and  even  though  some  considerable  number 
might  deplore  the  presence  and  prominence  of  the  pacer,  every  one 
of  them  would  welcome  him  with  great  joy  if  they  knew  he  was 
a  necessary  adjunct  of  the  trotter.  When  we  consider  the 
problem  of  reducing  the  ratio  of  pacers  and  increasing  the  ratio 
of  trotters  in  what  we  produce,  there  is  so  much  that  is  old  and 
still  imperfectly  known  in  what  we  incorrectly  call  our  "earlier" 
period  of  trotting  that  we  find  nothing  encouraging  in  the 
study.  The  origin  of  the  principal  trotters  of  the  early  part  of 


498  THE    HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

this  century,  except  the  direct  descendants  of  Messenger,  was  so 
sedulously  concealed  that  it  was  entirely  natural  for  so  many 
men  to  conclude  that  the  trotter  was  not  bred,  but  made  by  the 
trainer.  When  Flora  Temple  was  the  queen  nobody  knew  that 
her  speed  came  from  a  pacer.  Old  Kentucky  Hunter  was  a  very 
fast  pacer.  When  Pelham  was  king  nobody  knew  he  had  been 
a  pacer.  When  Highland  Maid  eclipsed  all  records  nobody  knew 
she  was  pacing  bred  and  had  been  a  pacer  herself.  When  Ver- 
mont Black  Hawk  was  the  most  popular  sire  of  his  day  nobody 
•knew  that  his  dam  was  "Old  Narragansetfc,"  a  pacer.  When  Ethan 
Allen  stood  at  the  head  of  all  young  trotters  the  old  grey  mare, 
his  dam,  was,  and  still  remains,  entirely  unknown,  but  everybody 
believes  that  a  large  share  of  his  speed  came  from  that  mare. 
Andrew  Jackson,  the  head  of  the  great  Clay  family,  was  out  of  a 
fast  pacing  mare.  And  thus  we  might  extend  the  list  indefinitely. 
But  away  back,  more  than  a  hundred  years  before  the  period  of 
which  we  are  here  speaking,  pacing  and  trotting  races  had  be- 
come so  numerous  that  they  had  to  be  suppressed  by  legislative 
enactment.  More  than  two  hundred  years  ago  there  were  pac- 
ing races  and  trotting  races  in  this  country,  and  then  as  now  it 
seems  evident  that  the  form  of  the  action  of  the  prospective  colt, 
whether  lateral  or  diagonal,  was  uncertain  until  it  appeared. 
This  condition  of  uncertainty  about  the  secrets  of  the  womb  has 
existed  for  centuries,  as  it  exists  to-day;  and  if  we  were  furnished 
a  complete  list  of  all  the  great  trotters  of  the  last  two  decades 
that  were  born  pacers  we  would  hardly  be  willing  to  believe  our 
own  senses.  The  following  short  list  of  such  animals  as  have 
gone  fast  at  both  forms  of  the  gait  will  serve  to  illustrate  the 
oneness  of  the  two  forms: 

PACING.     TROTTING. 

Jay-Eye-See,  bl.  g.  by  Dictator 2:06J  2:10 

Direct,  bl.  li.  by  Director 2;05J  2:18| 

Monbars,  b.  h.  by  Eagle  Bird 2:16f  2:11£ 

George  St.  Clair,  b.  h .  by  Betterton 2:10£  2:15£ 

Heir-at-Law,  bl.  h.  by  Mambrino  King 2:07|  2:12 

Ottinger,  br.  g.  by  Dorsey's  Nephew 2:ll-£  2:09f 

Bert  Oliver,  b.  h.  by  Ashland  Wilkes 2:08f  2:19£ 

Vassar,  gr.  h.  by  Vatican   2:07  2;21f 

Pilgrim,  br.  h.  by  Acolyte 2:10£  2:2()f 

San  Pedro,  bl.  g.  by  Del  Sur.... 2:10f  2:14| 

Wardwell,  b.  g.  by  Almont  Jr 2:16£  2:14£ 

Gazette,  b.  h.  by  Onward 2:09f  2:23f 

Welcome,  b.  h.  by  Arthur  Wilkes 2:10^  2:27^ 


HOW   THE   TROTTING   HORSE   IS   BRED. 

PACING.     TROTTING. 

Story's  Clay,  b.  h.  by  Everett  Clay 2:14f  2:18± 

Captain  Crouch,  cb.  b.  by  General  Smitb 2:13  2:25 

Red  Bud,  cb.  b.  by  Redfern 2:12£  2:14£ 

Cleveland  S.,  b.  b.  by  Montgomery 2:10  2:24 

Connor,  bl.  b.  by  C.  F.  Clay 2:14  2:13± 

Babette,  b.  m.  by  Sir  John 2:12±  2:22± 

This  exhibit  might  be  further  extended,  but  the  foregoing  will 
suffice  for  the  purpose  intended.  The  only  remark  that  seems 
needed  by  way  of  explanation  is  that  all  the  animals  named,  except 
two  (San  Pedro  and  Wardwell),  made  their  records  first  as  trotters. 

In  surveying  the  whole  situation  there  is  but  little  encourage- 
ment in  attempting  to  solve  the  problem  of  how  to  reduce  the 
ratio  of  the  pacers  and  at  the  same  time  avoid  the  reduction  of 
the  speed  of  the  trotters.  The  central  point  in  the  problem  is 
the  development  of  speed;  and  so  long  as  the  pacer  comes  to  his 
speed  so  much  quicker  and  easier  than  the  trotter,  and  so  long  as 
the  best  pacer  is  a  little  faster,  as  he  has  always  been,  than  the 
best  trotter,  there  is  no  probability  that  his  speed  will  not  be 
developed.  All  efforts  at  repression  or  exclusion  of  the  pacer 
from  contesting  for  prizes  at  public  meetings  would  be  futile  and, 
in  a  sense,  unjust.  Moreover,  this  would  not  be  in  the  province 
of  the  breeder  and  he  must  work  out  his  plans  within  the  boun- 
daries of  his  own  domain.  The  laws  of  heredity  apply  to  either 
of  the  two  forms  of  the  trot — the  lateral  and  the  diagonal — just 
as  certainly  as  they  apply  to  the  two  forms  united.  This  is  the 
breeder's  opportunity,  and  if  he  grasps  it  he  will  make  progress 
slowly  but  surely.  In  his  breeding  selections  he  must  lay  it 
down  as  an  inviolable  rule  that  all  pacers,  especially  pacers  with 
their  speed  developed,  must  be  excluded,  no  difference  how 
strongly  they  may  be  bred  in  the  best  trotting  lines.  If  a  horse 
produces  some  fillies  that,  like  Maud  S.,  Sunol  and  hundreds  of 
others,  are  halfway,  or  more  than  halfway,  inclined  to  pace,  he 
must  rigorously  keep  them  at  the  trot  and  nothing  but  the  trot, 
unless  he  sells  them.  He  must  study  intelligently  the  pedigrees 
and  produce  of  the  generations  away  back,  and  make  such  selec- 
tions as  are  most  likely  to  promote  his  object  and  least  likely  to 
violate  the  rule  laid  down.  Of  all  the  varieties  of  the  horse  on 
the  face  of  the  globe  the  American  trotter  is  the  typical  harness 
horse.  Our  civilization  no  longer  requires  the  saddle  to  climb 
through  mountain  passes,  and  to  follow  seldom-trodden  path?. 


.500  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

through  the  wilderness.  For  either  business  or  pleasure  we 
travel  on  wheels,  and  we  want  the  bold,  bounding  trotter  to 
propel  us.  The  pacer  is  the  early  and  only  saddle  horse  in  the 
world,  but  he  is  not  a  harness  horse.  Aside  from  the  few  that 
will  be  used  as  gambling  machines,  his  value  will  recede  while 
that  of  the  trotter  will  always  advance.  In  the  hands  of  a  man 
of  intelligent  and  fixed  purpose  it  is  certainly  possible  to  breed  a 
family  of  trotters  in  which  the  appearance  of  a  pacer  from  birth 
would  be  of  rare  occurrence,  and  the  longer  such  careful  selec- 
tions and  purposes  are  continued  the  more  rare  will  be  the  recur- 
rence of  the  lateral  habit  of  action. 

That  the  development  of  the  speed  of  the  parents  was  very 
important,  if  not  necessary  to  the  increased  speed  of  the  progeny, 
was  a  proposition  that  was  long  disputed.  Generally,  as  on  other 
questions,  each  man  argued  it  from  the  standpoint  of  his  own 
stable,  but  not  a  few  men  of  clear  minds  took  that  side  of  the 
question  without  regard  to  the  potency  of  the  law  of  heredity. 
In  the  early  stages  of  the  discussion  of  this  question  it  was  a 
difficult  one  to  handle  effectively.  At  that  time  very  few  sires, 
and  still  a  less  proportion  of  dams,  had  ever  been  regularly 
developed  as  trotters,  hence  the  field  for  generalization  was 
narrow  and  many  of  the  instances  quoted  were  disputed.  For  a  " 
time  the  battle  raged  quite  fiercely  around  Hambletonian,  as  he 
was  the  most  prominent  stallion  of  that  period,  and  if  a  man  was 
trying  to  build  up  another  family  he  would  rave  till  he  got  black 
in  the  face  against  "Bill  Rysdyk's  bull."  It  is  but  just  to  say 
that  the  man  who  led  in  all  this  froth  and  fury  against  Hamble- 
tonian was  engaged  in  breeding  what  he  called  "Clay  Arabs," 
and  after  dodging  his  creditors  for  a  number  of  years  his  last 
hoof  was  sold  from  him  by  the  sheriff.  On  the  other  hand,  Ham- 
bletonian made  his  master  a  rich  man,  and  he  left  a  large  estate. 
Hambletonian  was  only  partially  developed,  but  sufficient  to  shov/ 
he  was  a  fast  colt  for  his  period.  (For  full  particulars  see  his 
history  in  another  chapter.)  Abdallah  was  a  very  great  sire  of 
speed  and  he  was  not  a  developed  trotter,  but  his  dam,  old 
Amazonia,  was  quite  fully  developed.  She  won  many  races  and 
was  the  fastest  trotter  of  her  day.  Whether  her  speed  came 
from  a  fast  pacing  ancestry,  or  whether  it  came  from  the  reputed 
"son  of  Messenger,"  as  stated  when  she  was  bought  near  Phila- 
delphia, never  can  be  determined.  The  "son  of  Messenger" 
story  seemed  to  be  straight,  but  her  form  was  coarse  and  plain, 


HOW   THE   TROTTING   HORSE   IS   BRED.  501 

and  her  legs  were  so  hairy  that  many  who  knew  her  best  con- 
demned the  story;  hence,  all  we  can  say  about  her  is  simply  that 
she  was  a  fast  developed  trotter.  Andrew  Jackson  had  but  little 
trotting  inheritance  from  his  sire,  and  his  dam  was  a  fast  pacing 
mare  of  unknown  breeding,  but  his  speed  was  very  fully  devel- 
oped as  a  trotter,  and  he  became  the  progenitor  of  the  Clay  and 
the  Long  Island  Black  Hawk  families,  that  became  famous  in 
trotting  history.  While  this  reasoning  was  true  in  experience 
and  sound  under  the  canons  of  science,  it  was  not  strong  and 
convincing,  for  the  one  and  only  reason  that  the  basis  of  the 
generalization  was  too  narrow  and  lacked  in  a  sufficient  number 
of  cases  to  convince  the  understanding  of  the  skeptical.  We 
have  had  to  wait  for  the  accumulation  of  the  experiences  of  a. 
number  of  years,  and  now  we  have  the  evidence  that  is  so  com- 
plete as  to  be  really  startling  and  which  no  man  can  gainsay. 
The  following  little  table  embraces  all  the  breeding  farms  in  this, 
country  that  have  produced  three  or  more  trotters  with  records 
of  2:15  or  better,  and  here  the  rate  of  speed  is  certainly  high 
enough  and  the  foundation  is  certainly  broad  enough  to  furnish 
just  and  safe  conclusions: 

Leland  Stanford 18  Robert  G.  Stoner 4 

Fashion  Stud  Farm 13  R.  S.  Veech 3 

William  Corbitt 9  C.  W.  Williams 3 

Wm.  H.  Wilson 8  Highland  Farm  (Lee,  Mass.) 3 

C.  J.  Hamlin 7  Fairlawn  Farm 3 

Glenview  Farm. 6  E.  W.  Ayers & 

Timothy  Anglin 5  Charles  Backman .  & 

Henry  C.  Jewett 4  George  H.  Ely 3 

Wm.  C.  France 4  Mrs.  S.  L.  Stout 3 

Woodburn  Farm 4  Monroe  Salisbury 3 

Quite  a  number  of  other  breeders  have  produced  one  or  two- 
that  have  made  records  in  2:15  or  better,  but  I  think  the  above 
list  embraces  all  that  have  bred  three  or  more  with  trotting 
records  of  2:15-  or  better.  The  table  will  be  a  surprise  to  every- 
body, but  I  doubt  whether  it  will  be  a  greater  surprise  to  any- 
body than  it  is  to  myself.  At  the  head  of  the  list  stands  the  late 
Senator  Stanford's  great  establishment  with  eighteen  to  its 
credit,  but  this  is  not  a  fair  basis  of  comparison  with  any  other 
establishment  in  the  whole  country,  for  he  had  about  three  hun- 
dred mares  in  the  trotting  department  of  his  breeding  stud — 
about  six  times  as  large  as  the  average  of  the  larger  studs  of  tho. 


.502  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

country.  The  average  number  of  horses  in  training,  the  year 
round,  was  about  eighty,  exclusive  of  yearlings  and  the  kinder- 
garten. In  attempting  to  institute  a  comparison,,  therefore,  with 
the  average  breeders  of  the  country,  we  might  as  well  compare 
the  daily  receipts  of  John  Wanamaker's  store  with  those  of  the 
little  green-grocer  on  the  corner.  But  at  the  head  of  this  estab- 
lishment stood  the  great  Electioneer  with  his  strong  breeding 
and  trotting  speed  well  developed,  and  indeed,  in  many  respects 
the  greatest  horse  of  his  generation.  He  was  the  sire  of  eleven 
in  the  list,  and  the  remainder  were  either  by  his  sons  or  out  of 
his  daughters. 

Mr.  Henry  N.  Smith,  of  New  York,  a  prominent  Wall  Street 
man,  became  greatly  interested  in  trotting  sport,  and  in  1868  he 
organized  a  trotting  stable  of  his  own,  which  contained  some  re- 
markable animals,  as  will  be  seen  below.  His  stable  was  very 
.successful,  and  this  success  naturally  increased  his  attachment 
to  the  trotting  interests.  He  then  determined  to  establish  a 
breeding  farm,  and  about  the  year  1869  he  purchased  the  famous 
old  Fashion  Course  adjoining  Trenton,  New  Jersey,  embracing 
one  hundred  and  forty-five  acres  of  land  and  provided  with  an 
excellent  mile  track  and  much  stabling  that  had  been  constructed 
vears  before  for  running  horses.  This  property  he  very  appro- 
priately named  the  ' 'Fashion  Stud  Farm,"  and  on  it  he  placed 
the  grandest  assemblage  of  developed  trotters,  for  breeding  pur- 
poses only,  that  had  ever  been  brought  together  in  this  or  any 
other  country.  His  stallions  were  Jay  Gould,  2:20|,  Tattler, 
2:26,  and  Gen.  Knox,  2:31-|.  This  was  Knox's  fastest  record, 
but  it  was  known  he  had  trotted  miles,  in  races,  faster  than  this. 
'The  speed  of  all  three  horses  was  developed,  and  it  is  evident 
at  a  glance  that  there  was  only  one  first-class  horse  among  them. 
But  the  great  strength  of  the  establishment  was  in  the  grand 
galaxy  of  mares,  some  of  which  I  will  enumerate,  namely,  Gold- 
smith Maid,  2:14,  Lady  Thorn,  2:18J,  Lucy,  2:18i,  Lady  Maud, 
2:18i,  Rosalind,  2:21|,  Belle  Strickland,  2:26,  Western  Girl,  2:27, 
Idol,  2:27,  Big  Mary,  2:28-J,  Daisy  Burns,  2:28,  Music's  Dam  (that 
had  produced  2:21^  speed),  besides  others  with  slower  records  or 
known  to  have  had  their  speed  developed  as  fast  road  mares, 
making  in  all  about  thirty  mares  on  the  farm,  and  Mr.  Smith 
claimed  that  every  one  of  them  had  shown  more  or  less  speed  as 
trotters. 

Mr.  Smith  neither  knew  nor  cared  much  about  pedigrees,  in  a 


HOW   THE   TROTTIKG    HORSE    IS    BRED.  503 

general  sense,  and  when  you  came  to  talk  to  him  about  "nicks" 
and  "trotting  pitch"  and  all  that  kind  of  tomfoolery,  his  mind 
simply  recurred  to  the  old  adage  uttered  generations  ago:  "Trot 
father,  trot  mother,  trot  colt."  His  whole  philosophy  was 
wrapped  up  in  the  one  central  truth  that  the  horse  that  could  go 
out  and  trot  fast,  when  hred  on  the  mare  that  could  go  out  and 
trot  fast,  would  produce  a  colt  that  would  go  out  and  trot  fast. 
This  was  sufficient  for  him  or  indeed  for  anybody  else,  for  it  con- 
tains and  expresses  the  whole  substance  of  the  laws  of  heredity. 
Mr.  Smith's  great  mares  acquired  in  their  training  and  develop- 
ment new  characters  and  new  capacities  which  they  never  would 
have  possessed  had  it  not  been  for  the  care  and  skill  expended  in 
their  training.  Here  we  touch  the  very  marrow  of  a  question 
around  which  the  scientists  of  to-day  are  warring.  Darwin 
taught  that  such  acquisitions  were  transmissible,  of  the  truth  of 
which  I  have  no  doubt,  but  a  post-Darwinian  school  has  arisen 
which  controverts  this  position,  and  claims  that  it  weakens  and 
destroys  the  whole  evolution  theory  of  creation.  But  it  matters 
not  about  the  hypothesis  of  evolution  concerning  things  we 
know,  for  it  is  simply  an  attempt  to  show  how  all  tilings  might 
have  been  created  without  a  Creator.  I  have  read  a  great  deal 
about  evolution  and  the  transmissibility  of  acquired  characters, 
but  in  all  I  have  read  I  never  have  met  with  a  lesson  so  broad  and 
so  strong  as  that  furnished  by  Henry  N.  Smith's  great  mares, 
proving  that  acquired  characters  are  transmitted. 

In  instituting  a  comparison  between  the  high-class  products  of 
the  Palo  Alto  and  the  Fashion  Stud  Farms,  it  seems  to  be  neces- 
sary to  place  the  premier  stallions  of  the  two  side  and  side. 
They  were  half-brothers  on  the  side  of  the  sire,  but  Electioneer 
had  the  greatest  speed-producing  dam  of  her  generation.  She 
was  a  fast  natural  trotter  herself,  and  was  out  of  a  fast  and  fully 
developed  trotter.  Jay  Gould  was  out  of  a  good  road  mare  by 
American  Star,  but  nobody  has  ever  said  she  had  any  speed,  and 
she  was  out  of  a  nondescript  mare  that  we  know  nothing  about. 
Gould's  dam  never  produced  any  other  trotter  with  a  reputable 
rate  of  speed,  so  far  as  I  have  been  able  to  learn.  Electioneer 
was  trained  and  developed  by  Mr.  Backman,  but  he  never  was  in 
a  race,  and  consequently  he  has  no  official  record.  After  he 
was  taken  to  Palo  Alto  he  was  given  quite  regular  work,  and 
it  is  beyond  all  doubt  that  when  in  stud  condition  he  could  show 
a  quarter  in  a  little  better  than  a  2:20  gait.  The  difference  in 


504  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

the  rate  of  speed,  therefore,  as  between  the  two  horses  was  not 
very  great,  but  whatever  it  was  must  go  to  the  credit  of  Jay 
Gould.  But  the  offspring  of  Electioneer  had  a  very  great  advan- 
tage over  those  of  Jay  Gould  in  the  methodical  and  skillful  de- 
velopment of  their  speed.  In  his  maternal  inheritance  as  a  trot- 
ter, as  already  indicated,  Electioneer  had  a  marked  superiority, 
and  on  an  equally  high  class  of  developed  mares  he  would  have 
far  outstripped  his  rival.  Now,  with  this  attempt  at  a  clean-cut 
description  of  the  two  horses,  we  are  ready  to  consider  the  ques- 
tion in  its  arithmetical  elements,  and  it  will  be  found  a  plain 
question  of  "simple  proportion"  which  anybody  can  solve  in  a, 
minute,  as  follows:  "If  the  Fashion  Stud  Farm  from  thirty 
mares  produced  thirteen  trotters  with  public  records  of  2:15  or 
better,  how  many  of  equal  capacity  should  the  Palo  Alto  Farm 
have  produced  from  three  hundred  mares?"  The  answer  is  one 
hundred  and  thirty,  but  the  facts,  up  to  the  close  of  1896, 
furnish  us  with  the  beggarly  number  of  eighteen. 

The  grand  assemblage  of  so  many  great  trotters  at  the  Fashion 
Stud  Farm,  and  all  for  the  purpose  of  breeding,  was  the  subject 
of  much  comment  among  breeders  from  one  end  of  the  land  to 
the  other,  and  not  a  few  pronounced  it  all  wrong  and  that  it. 
would  be  succeeded  by  failure.  Mr.  Smith  lacked  some  of  the 
elements  that  go  toward  making  a  man  popular,  and  hence,  in 
many  cases,  there  was  not  much  sympathy  between  him  and  his 
brother  breeders,  but  he  held  tenaciously  to  the  central  truth 
that  the  way  to  breed  high-class  trotters  was  to  mate  high-class 
trotters.  His  experience  has  clearly  demonstrated  the  soundness 
of  this  canon  of  breeding,  and  it  has  just  as  clearly  demonstrated 
the  unsoundness  of  the  notion  that  high-class  trotters  can  be 
bred  from  animals  that  never  trotted  and  never  could  be  made  to 
trot.  The  law,  as  we  have  taught  it  for  years,  has  been  vindi- 
cated, and  that  by  experiences  so  wide  and  so  complete  that  it 
can  no  longer  be  controverted.  Mr.  Smith  has  achieved  a  great, 
honor,  and  as  a  producer  of  high-class  speed  he  stands  at  the  head 
of  all  American  trotting-horse  breeders. 

As  we  have  now  considered  a  great  triumph,  with  the  causes 
that  led  up  to  it  and  the  lesson  it  has  taught,  it  seems  to  be  in 
order  to  give  an  example  of  a  great  failure  and  the  causes  which 
have  produced  it.  For  more  than  forty  years  Woodburn  Farm, 
in  Kentucky,  has  been  breeding  trotters,  and  up  to  the  close  of 
1896  just  four  with  records  of  2:15  or  better  have  hailed  from. 


HOW   THE   TROTTING   HORSE   IS   BRED.  505 

that  great  establishment.     During  all  these  years,  and  until  Palo 
Alto  Farm  was  established,  Woodburn  was  the  largest  establish- 
ment in  this  country.     With  thousands  of  broad  acres  of  the  most 
productive  soil,  with  the  possession  and  control  of  money  with- 
out limit,  and  with  the  experiences  of  forty  years  in  which  to 
select  and  breed  only  to  the  best,  it  is  the  natural  and  reasonable 
expectation  of  everybody  interested  in  the  question  of  breeding 
the  trotter  to  look  to   Woodburn  as  leading  all  other  establish- 
ments in  the  whole  world  in  th3  production  of  first-class  trotters. 
And  what  has  Woodburn  done?     With  her  experiences  of  forty 
years,  with  all  her  broad  acres  and  boundless  wealth,  up  to  the 
close  of  1896  she  has  produced  just  four  trotters  with  records  of 
2:15  or  better.     Instead  of  leading  all  others,  she  is  at  the  wrong 
end  of  the  procession,  and  if  we  consider  the  proportional  advan- 
tages involved,  we  find  that  "all  others,"  little  and  big,  are  lead- 
ing her.     By  referring  to  the  above  list  of  breeders  that  have 
produced  three  or  more  with  records  of  2:15  or  better,  we  find 
that  Henry  N.  Smith  has  produced  thirteen,  that  William  Cor- 
bett,  from  his  little  stud  in   California,  has  produced  nine,  and 
that  the  late  William  H.  Wilson,  of  Cynthiana,  Kentucky,  from 
his  little  band  of  mares,  and  without  either  broad  acres  or  money, 
has  produced  eight  within  the  past  twelve  or  fifteen  years,  and 
-all  except  one  by  the  same  horse.     This  places  Mr.  Wilson  first 
among  all  Kentucky  breeders.     Jn  the  short  period  of  its  exist- 
ence Glenview   Farm  produced  six,  and  the  quite  unpretentious 
farmer,  Mr.  Timothy  Anglin,  produced  five;  W.   C.   France  and 
Colonel  R.   G.  Stoner  produced  four  each — the  same  number  as 
Woodburn — but  they  did  not  require  forty  years  to  accomplish 
it.     Thus  the  breeding  world,  with  "the  little  fellows7'  on  top, 
has  gone  away  ahead  and  left  Woodburn  to  mumble  over  her 
"tin  cups,"  and  exult  in  the  many  triumphs  she  has  won  against 
the  watch  in  2:30.     The  policy  of  Woodburn    for  years    past 
seems  to  have  been  to  hold  the  lead  of  Kentucky  breeders  in 
the  production  of  2:30  trotters,  and  to  this  end  the  youngsters 
are  put  in  training  in  the  early  spring  and  kept  at  it  till  the  frosts 
come,  when  such  of  them  as  are  sure  to  win  are  brought  out  and 
started  against  the  watch,  for  a  "tin  cup,"  and  these  are  the  vic- 
tories that  Woodburn  wins.     Nobody  has  ever  heard  of  Wood- 
burn  entering  a  youngster  in  a  stake  where  he  would  have  to  win 
on  his  merits.     That  would  be  bringing  him  down  to  an  equality 
with  the  colts  of  such  people  as  William  H.  Wilson,  Colonel  E. 


506  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

G.  Stoner,  Farmer  Timothy  Anglin,  and  all  the  other  "little 
fellows."  Woodburn  has  made  a  great  deal  of  money  out  of 
these  humbug  tin-cup  records,  and  as  registration  and  the 
standard  are  now  absolutely  under  the  control  of  her  manager, 
the  2:30-tin-cup  still  remains  the  evidence  of  a  fast  trotter, 
worthy  of  standard  rank.  True,  everybody  nowadays  laughs 
at  the  idea  that  2:30,  with  the  "tin  cup,"  is  any  evidence  of  even 
reputable  speed,  but  as  they  have  given  a  certain  kind  of  pre- 
eminence and  made  money  in  the  past,  the  twins  will  not  be 
separated,  but  will  hold  their  places  just  as  long  as  the  standard 
is  under  the  present  control. 

From  this  brief  examination  of  the  symptoms  I  think  a  safe 
diagnosis  can  be  made.  The  trouble  seems  to  be  twofold,  or  it 
may  be  said  there  are  two  troubles,  either  one  of  which  is  dan- 
gerous, but  the  two  together  m^y  prove  fatal  in  the  end.  It  is  a 
well-known  fact  in  veterinary  science  that  there  are  certain  dis- 
eases among  horses  that  may  be  communicated  to  the  men  who 
have  them  in  charge.  There  is  one  disease,  vulgarly  called  "big- 
head,"  that  comes  creeping  upon  its  victim  before  he  is  aware 
of  its  existence  or  approach,  and  against  the  insidious  steps  of 
this  destroyer  the  manager  at  Woodburn  should  be  affectionately 
warned.  Sham  records  of  2:30  for  standard  rank  are  no  longer 
welcomed  with  enthusiasm  in  this  country.  The  other  trouble 
is  not  so  much  with  the  manager  as  with  the  material  which  he 
manages,  which  seems  to  be  affected  with  what  may  be  called 
"dry-rot."  This  view  of  the  non-productive  character  of  the 
Woodburn  breeding  stock,  when  measured  by  first-class  perform- 
ers, seems  to  be  borne  out  by  the  fact  that  the  names  of  those 
gentlemen  who  have  depended  most  largely  on  Woodburn  blood 
do  not  appear  on  the  foregoing  list  as  tha  producers  of  first-class, 
trotters.  For  about  forty  years  the  fame  of  W^oodburn  as  the 
greatest  of  all  our  breeding  establishments  has  been  as  wide  as. 
the  boundaries  of  the  nation.  But  notwithstanding  the  weight 
and  influence  which  great  wealth  and  an  unblemished  name  may 
have  secured,  the  records  up  to  the  close  of  the  year  1896  have 
deposed  her  from  the  first  rank  as  a  breeder  of  trotting  horses, 
and  sent  her  away  to  the  rear,  where  she  now  occupies  her  true 
place  in  the  eighth  rank.  It  is  well  known  to  everybody  that, 
since  the  days  of  the  first  Mr.  Alexander,  Woodburn  has  never 
entered  a  colt  in  a  stake  nor  started  one  against  other  people's 
colts,  prize  or  no  prize.  This  air  of  assumed  superiority  is. 


HOW  THE  TROTTING   HORSE  IS   BRED.  507 

sought  to  be  explained  on  high  moral  grounds  against  the  evils 
of  horse-racing.  This  is  like  the  man  who  never  tasted  whisky 
for  conscience'  sake,  in  view  of  the  great  evil  it  was  doing  in  the 
world,  and  yet  he  was  the  chief  owner  in  a  large  distillery.  At 
the  great  local  meetings  in  Kentucky  practically  all  the  breeding 
establishments  of  that  region,  except  Woodburn,  are  repre- 
sented in  the  stakes,  and  while  they  are  being  contested  Wood- 
burn  will  come  in  with  a  string  of  youngsters,  between  the  heats, 
and  win  sham  records  in  2:30  for  "tin  cups."  Depending  on 
this  kind  of  test  and  this  kind  of  development,  it  is  not  remark- 
able that  all  the  small  breeders  of  the  State  have  left  Woodburn 
in  the  rear.  This  shining  example  of  failure  teaches  unmistaka- 
bly the  necessity  of  honest  and  full  development  of  breeding, 
stock  in  order  to  produce  high-class  trotters. 


CHAPTER    XXXIII. 

HOW   THE   TROTTING    HORSE    IS    BRED    (Continued). 

Breeding  the  trotter  intelligently  an  industry  of  modern  development — Pleth- 
ora of  turf  papers,  and  their  timidity  of  the  truth — The  accepted  theories, 
old  and  new — Failure  of  the  "thoroughbred  blood  in  the  trotter"  idea — 
"Thoroughbred  foundations,"  and  the  Register — "Like  begets  like,"  the 
great  central  truth — Long-continued  efforts  to  breed  trotters  from  runners 
— New  York  the  original  source  of  supply  of  trotting  blood  to  all  the 
States— Kentucky's  beginning  in  breeding  trotters — R.  A.  Alexander,  and 
the  founding  of  Woodburn — The  "  infallibility  "  of  Wood  burn  pedigrees 
— Refusal  to  enter  fictitious  crosses  in  the  Register  and  the  results — The 
genesis  and  history  of  the  standard — Its  objects,  effects  and  influence — 
Establishing  the  breed  of  trotters — The  Kentucky  or  "Pinafore"  stand- 
dard — Its  purposes  analyzed — The  "Breeders'  Trotting  Stud  Book"  and 
how  it  was  compiled — Failure  and  collapse  of  the  Kentucky  project — 
Another  unsuccessful  attempt  to  capture  the  Register — How  honest 
administration  of  the  Register  made  enemies — The  National  Breeder's 
Association  and  the  Chicago  Convention — Detailed  history  of  the  sale  and 
transfer  of  the  Register,  the  events  that  led  up  to  it,  and  the  results — 
Personal  satisfaction  and  benefits  from  the  transfer,  and  the  years  of  rest 
and  congenial  study  in  preparing  this  book — The  end. 

ALL  that  American  breeders  know  about  producing  the  trot- 
ting horse  they  have  learned  in  the  past  twenty-five  years.  In 
that  short  period  this  interest  has  developed  from  practically 
nothing  into  a  great  national  industry  that  has  placed  this  coun- 
try in  front  of  all  the  nations  of  the  earth  in  the  character,  qual- 
ity and  speed  of  the  light  harness  horse.  It  is  true  we  had  the 
"raw  material"  out  of  which  to  build  up  this  new  breed,  and  this 
had  been  in  our  possession  we  may  say  for  generations,  but  we 
•didn't  know  how  to  use  it.  There  may  be  some  apparent  indeli- 
cacy in  making  the  remark,  but  I  think  every  intelligent  man 
who  is  acquainted  with  the  subject  will  sustain  me  in  saying  that, 
had  it  not  been  for  the  compilation  of  the  "Trotting  Register" 
.and  Wallace's  Monthly,  with  the  facts,  statistics  and  reasonings 
which  were  developed  through  them,  we  would  know  no  more 
.about  the  trotter  to-day  than  we  did  thirty  years  ago.  The  trot- 


HOW   THE   TROTTIXG   HORSE   IS   BRED.  O091 

ting  horse,  therefore,  as  we  contemplate  him  in  his  position  of 
superiority  to  all  others  of  his  kind,  is  simply  the  result  of  great 
labor  in  collecting  the  facts  and  sound  reasoning  from  the  lessons 
taught  by  those  facts.  With  all  the  facts  placed  in  his  hand, 
any  breeder  of  intelligence,  if  he  were  honest,  could  not  fail  to 
reach  the  truth;  but,  unfortunately,  all  breeders  have  never 
learned  to  divest  themselves  of  their  prejudices,  and  to  accept 
the  plain  teachings  of  the  facts,  just  as  they  are. 

To  be  able  to  think  intelligently  and  honestly  and  to  reason 
soundly,  is  the  first  requisite  to  success  in  breeding  the  trotter. 
It  is  a  seeming  paradox,  but  it  is  nevertheless  true,  that  many 
men  who  are  able  to  think  a  little  are  not  able  to  think  honestly. 
It  is  easy  to  understand  why  a  man  may  act  dishonestly,  for  there 
is  the  hope  of  gain  to  impel  him;  but  why  he  should  think  dis- 
honestly is  not  so  apparent.  Let  us  illustrate  this  matter  of 
thinking  dishonestly.  On  an  occasion  a  correspondent  asked  a 
breeding  journal  to  give  a  list  of  the  thoroughbred  horses  that 
had  sired  trotters.  A  list  of  horses,  represented  as  thoroughbred 
in  the  reply,  was  given,  embracing  some  ten  or  twelve,  about  half 
of  which  were  either  unknown  or  dependent  npon  the  most  flimsy 
kind  of  representation  as  to  their  blood.  It  is  not  with  the 
actual  misrepresentation  of  the  blood  of  most  of  the  animals 
named,  but  with  the  use  that  was  made  of  the  list  that  I  will  now 
speak.  After  accepting  the  list  as  true  and  genuine,  the  corre- 
spondent comes  before  the  public  with  his  conclusions.  H& 
shows  that  these  dozen  performers  from  about  as  many  horses 
made  an  average  record  of  2:24  and  a  fraction,  and  then  trium- 
phantly raises  the  question  whether  any  single  trotting-bred  sire 
can  show  as  many  performers  with  as  low  an  average  record. 
Having  satisfied  himself  that  all  the  running-bred  sires,  real  and 
imaginary,  put  together  could  more  than  equal  any  one  trotting- 
bred  sire  in  the  average  high  rate  of  speed,  he  reaches  the  pro- 
found conclusion  that  the  way  to  breed  the  trotter  is  to  go  to  the 
runner.  This  is  a  real  and  not  an  imaginary  instance  of  a  few 
years  ago.  No  doubt  this  man  thought  he  was  thinking  when  he 
reached  this  conclusion,  and  that  he  had  solved  the  problem  of 
breeding  the  trotter;  but,  poor  man,  he  was  simply  trying  to 
advertise  a  half-and-half-bred  stallion  he  had  in  his  stable. 

I  have  no  old  scores  to  pay  off  against  the  breeding  and  sport- 
ing press,  for  I  generally  managed  to  pay  them  off  as  we  went 
along,  and  the  triumph  of  the  views  I  advanced  and  sustained 


510  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

has  become  sufficiently  complete  to  satisfy  the  most  fastidious. 
It  seems  to  be  a  real  misfortune  that  there  are  so  many  weekly 
journals  in  this  field  and  most  of  them  leading  a  precarious  exist- 
ence. It  may  be  observed  in  most  directions  that  the  manage- 
ment of  these  journals  is  hesitating  and  timid,  as  though  afraid 
that  somebody  might  be  offended  and  a  five  or  ten-dollar  adver- 
tisement lost  thereby.  It  is  ail  right  to  make  the  advertising 
patronage  remunerative,  but  it  is  all  wrong  when  that  depart- 
ment is  placed  in  control  of  all  the  others,  from  the  fear  that 
somebody  may  be  offended  if  the  truth  be  told.  In  the  present 
depressed  condition  of  the  breeding  interests,  and.  indeed  of  all 
interests,  the  horsemen  of  the  whole  country  feel  that  they  are 
carrying  too  heavy  a  burden  in  supporting  so  many  papers,  and 
the  question  of  the  ' 'survival  of  the  fittest"  is  already  imminent. 
But,  whatever  the  present  financial  and  intellectual  condition  of 
the  breeding  and  sporting  publications  of  the  country  may  be,  a 
number  of  them  have  had  their  part  in  the  discussions  and 
wrangles  that  were  naturally  coincident  with  the  progress  of  the 
revolution  on  the  question  of  breeding  the  trotter,  which  finally 
brushed  everything  out  of  its  way  and  fully  established  the  truth 
of  the  laws  of  inheritance.  Twenty-five  years  ago  there  was  a 
good  number  of  intelligent  and  capable  writers  on  the  horse,  and 
they  were  either  engaged  in  editing  horse  papers  or  contributed 
to  them,  and  one  and  all  they  were  handicapped  with  the  idea, 
inherited  from  their  fathers,  that  whatever  of  excellence  that  was 
found  in  the  American  horse  came  from  the  English  race  horse,  and 
that  all  the  speed,  at  any  gait,  that  he  was  able  to  show  came  from 
the  same  source.  From  this  absurd  fallacy,  it  naturally  followed 
that  speed  at  the  trot  was  merely  the  result  of  accident  or  of  the 
persistent  skill  of  the  trainer.  This  was,  substantially,  the  view 
of  the  general  public  at  that  date. 

When,  therefore,  it  was  announced  that  the  horse  was  far  more 
than  a  mere  machine,  that  he  had  a  mental  as  well  as  a  physical 
organization,  that  these  were  both  equally  matters  of  inheritance, 
that  one  horse  ran  fast  because  his  ancestors  ran  fast  and  that 
another  horse  trotted  fast  because  his  ancestors  were  able  to  trot 
fast,  and  that  no  fast  runner  was  ever  a  fast  trotter,  there  was  a 
tremendous  hubbub.  This  was  a  new  gospel,  and  it  threatened 
to  annihilate  the  stupid  Anglo- Arabian  fetish  that  all  that  was 
good  in  horsedom  must  of  necessity  come  from  that  source.  For 
generations  the  belief  had  been  universal  that  the  only  way  to 


HOW   THE   TROTTING   HORSE   IS   BRED.  511 

improve  the  horse  for  any  purpose  under  the  sun  was  to  * 'breed 
up"  to  the  running  horse  and  thus  get  back  to  the  blood  of  the 
pure  Arabian.  On  the  other  hand,  and  as  opposed  to  this  ancient 
fallacy  that  the  way  to  breed  the  trotter  was  to  go  to  the  runner, 
it  was  urged,  with  a  thousand  proofs  at  the  back  of  it,  that  the 
way  to  breed  the  the  runner  was  to  go  to  the  horse  that  could 
run,  and  the  way  to  breed  the  trotter  was  to  go  to  the  horse  that 
could  trot.  Here  was  a  direct  issue  squarely  made,  and  it  was 
not  to  be  expected  that  such  men  as  Charles  J.  Foster,  Peter  C. 
Kellogg,  Joseph  C.  Simpson,  etc.,  all  writers  of  ability,  would 
quietly  surrender  without  a  battle.  They  had  committed  them- 
selves to  the  running-blood  traditions,  some  rich  men  had  shaped 
their  breeding  studs  in  that  direction,  and  without  deciding 
whether  a  rich  man  had  necessarily  more  sense  than  a  poor  one, 
they  knew  instinctively  that  a  rich  man  could  be  more  liberal  in 
advertising,  and  that  he  could  be  more  generous  in  properly 
recognizing  the  little  courtesies  that  might  be  extended  in  the 
way  of  keeping  his  establishment  before  the  public  in  an  approv- 
ing light.  Thus,  with  an  eye  to  the  weather-gauge,  the  editors 
were  able  to  maintain  their  own  consistency.  As  the  experiences 
of  every  succeeding  year  added  thousands  of  proofs  to  the  plain 
proposition  that  the  trotter  inherits  his  speed  from  a  trotting 
ancestry,  the  "irreconcilables"  began  to  shift  their  ground,  con- 
ceding that  there  must  be  trotting  blood  to  give  the  action,  but 
that  there  must  be  ''speed-sustaining"  blood  from  the  thorough- 
bred to  give  courage  and  endurance.  This  was  the  second  posi- 
tion, and  in  a  commercial  sense  it  was  shrewdly  chosen  for  the 
advantage  of  certain  localities.  This  position  furnished  the 
"thoroughbred  foundation"  argument,  and  for  a  time  it  had  its 
supporters.  This  theory  also  furnished  its  promised  commercial 
advantages  to  such  localities  as  had  formerly  bred  running  horses, 
and  it  was  but  a  week  till  everybody  in  those  localities  had 
*  'thorough  bred  foundations"  for  their  trotting  pedigrees,  and 
those  who  did  not  have  them  could  easily  procure  them.  This 
brought  an  avalanche  of  pedigrees,  especially  from  Kentuckv, 
with  "thoroughbred  foundations,"  consisting  of  long  strings  of 
dams  by  famous  horses,  but  without  names,  dates,  breeders  or 
histories,  and  many  of  them  impossible.  To  checkmate  this 
inundation  of  manufactured  foundations,  in  the  office  of  the 
Register,  a  rule  was  adopted  requiring  satisfactory  identification 
and  history  of  each  dam,  and  where  that  could  not  be  given  the 


512  THE   HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

pedigree  would  be  cut  off.  This  rule  saved  the  "Trotting  Regis- 
ter" from  becoming  the  mere  dumping  place  for  countless  frauds, 
but  it  aroused  such  a  feeling  of  antagonism  on  the  part  of  the 
manager  of  Woodburn  Farm  that  he,  at  once,  started  an  opposi- 
tion Register  to  be  compiled  at  the  farm,  under  his  own  personal 
direction.  Of  this,  and  what  came  of  it,  I  will  speak  further  on. 
It  is  but  just  that  I  should  say  here,  that  from  a  wide  knowledge 
of  men  and  from  a  study  of  their  moral  fiber  extending  through 
many  years  in  connection  with  horse  affairs,  I  have  found  many 
Kentuckians  that  were  thoroughly  truthful  and  reliable  in  pedi- 
gree matters;  but  at  the  same  time  it  must  be  admitted  that  the 
conditions  there  for  generations  past  have  not  been  favorable, 
among  horsemen,  for  the  cultivation  of  the  highest  type  of  truth- 
fulness. Many  of  them  have  been  making  their  own  pedigrees 
for  so  long,  and  padding  them  out  with  nameless  dams  by  sup- 
positions sires,  to  suit  themselves — and  the  market — that  they 
don't  take  kindly  to  any  restraint  in  what  they  consider  their  own 
business. 

The  great  central  truth  in  reproduction,  whether  of  animals 
or  plants,  is  summed  up  in  the  homely  but  axiomatic  phrase, 
"like  begets  like.7'  With  the  rank  and  file  of  intelligent  breeders 
who  were  able  to  think,  this  axiom  was  soon  accepted  as  a  funda- 
mental and  basic  truth.  The  phrase  "trotting  instinct"  was 
soon  in  everybody's  mouth,  and  the  broad,  plain  distinction  be- 
tween that  and  "running  instinct"  was  so  palpable  and  easy  of 
practical  comprehension  that  the  fallacy  of  a  "thoroughbred 
foundation"  was  buried  out  of  sight.  When  it  was  considered 
that  the  instinct  of  the  one  was  to  put  forth  his  supreme  effort 
at  the  trot,  and  of  the  other  to  put  forth  his  supreme  effort  at 
the  gallop,  the  irreconcilable  antagonism  between  the  two  gaits 
was  apparent.  The  cumulative  evidences  furnished  year  after 
year  by  the  official  records  of  performances  on  the  tracks,  and  all 
going  to  show  that  the  trotting  horse  must  have  a  trotting  in- 
heritance, soon  became  so  overwhelming  in  the  uniformity  of 
their  teachings,  and  so  completely  unanswerable  in  the  force  of 
numbers,  that  no  man  able  to  observe  and  think  could  any  longer 
doubt  the  truth  of  the  position  taken.  But,  unfortunately,  some 
men  can  neither  observe  nor  think,  and,  what  is  still  more  un- 
fortunate, they  not  infrequently  undertake  to  fill  the  r61e  of 
public  teachers  and  leaders  of  public  thought.  We  can  under- 
stand how  a  man  of  average  intelligence  may  be  wise  in  many 


HOW   THE   TROTTING    HORSE    IS    BRED.  513 

things  and  foolish  in  others.  When  we  come  to  study  the 
phenomena  he  presents,  we  find  he  has  studied  the  subjects  on 
which  he  is  wise,  and  he  is  ignorant  on  the  subjects  on  which  he 
is  foolish.  Like  ''Brother  Jasper,"  the  negro  preacher,  he  is 
ready  to  maintain  against  all  comers  that  "the  sun  do  move." 
Another  class  of  men  in  the  writing  fraternity,  but  fortunately 
they  are  restricted  in  numbers,  have  brains  enough  to  apprehend 
the  facts  surrounding  them  and  their  teachings,  but  they  have 
not  conscience  enough  to  lift  them  above  their  toadying  instincts, 
for  fear  they  might  miss  the  crumbs  from  a  rich  patron's  table. 
Another  type  of  man,  generally  a  beginner  in  the  breeding  busi- 
ness, has  a  half-and-half-bred  stallion  at  the  head  of  his  little 
stud,  and  he  is  uniformly  an  enthusiast  for  the  '  'thoroughbred 
foundation."  As  might  be  expected,  he  fills  the  columns  of  all 
the  papers  accessible  with  his  "views  of  breeding,"  which  are 
always  shaped  to  fit  his  own  stallion  and  bring  him  patronage. 
We  might  here  go  on  and  point  out  other  types  of  would-be 
"teachers"  that  would  be  entertaining,  but  certainly  not  profita- 
ble or  instructive.  We  might  follow  the  vagaries  of  different 
writers  and  show  the  origin  and  reason  for  those  vagaries,  but  as 
the  breeding  world  has  become  far  more  intelligent,  and  I  think 
more  honest,  than  it  was  twenty-five  years  ago,  one  vagary  after 
another  has  disappeared  and  been  buried  out  of  sight.  All  such 
trumpery  as,  "to  breed  the  trotter  you  must  go  to  the  runner," 
"more  running  blood  in  the  trotter,"  "thoroughbred  founda- 
tion," etc.,  are  phrases  that  are  never  heard  in  our  day  among 
intelligent  breeders.  A  mile  in  two  minutes  and  thirty  seconds 
is  "played  out"  as  an  evidence  of  trotting  speed,  but  it  is  still 
held  in  its  place  as  such  evidence  to  suit  the  blood  and  methods 
of  development  at  one  particular  establishment,  and  to  gather  in 
the  money  for  registration  from  the  little  fellows. 

Anything  slower  than  "two-twenty"  is  no  longer  looked  upon 
as  of  any  value  in  a  trotting  sense. 

This  astonishing  increase  of  speed  has  come  hand  in  hand  with 
a  closer  and  more  careful  observance  of  the  law  of  inheritance, 
or  heredity.  If  we  breed  the  merino  ram  upon  a  merino  ewe,  we 
know  that  the  produce  will  be  a  merino.  If  we  breed  the 
cotswold  on  the  cotswold  we  know  the  produce  will  be  a  cotswold, 
but  if  we  breed  the  merino  on  the  cotswold  the  produce  will  be  a 
mongrel.  The  phsyical  inheritance  is  destroyed,  and  in  propagat- 
ing from  this  mongrel  confusion,  uncertainty  and  disappoint- 


514  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

ment  always  follow.  If  we  go  a  step  higher  and  consider  those 
types  of  domestic  animals  endowed  with  a  species  of  mentality 
that  we  call  instinct,  we  find  the  illustrations  still  more  marked 
and  effective.  The  finely  bred  greyhound  coupled  with  the 
finely  bred  pointer  produces  neither  a  greyhound  nor  a  pointer, 
but  only  a  nondescript  cur.  Sometimes  the  instincts  of  the 
greyhound  and  sometimes  the  instincts  of  the  pointer  may  be  the 
more  masterful,  but  the  inheritance  is  broken  and  divided,  and 
the  mongrel  should  never  be  used  for  propagation.  If  we  couple 
the  very  best  specimen  of  the  English  race  horse  with  the  very 
best  and  fastest  American  trotting  mare,  the  produce  would  be 
literally  half-and-half  bred.  The  sire  never  could  trot  a  mile  in 
four  minutes  and  the  dam  never  could  run  a  mile  in  two  minutes, 
and  what  is  the  produce  good  for?  Once  in  a  hundred  times  the 
running  instinct  might  predominate  and  develop  something  of 
a  runner,  and  once  in  a  hundred  times  the  trotting  instinct 
might  predominate,  as  in  the  case  of  Bonnie  Scotland  and  Water- 
witch,  and  produce  something  of  a  trotter,  but  of  what  value 
would  the  half-and-half  progeny  be  for  breeding  purposes? 
Whatever  might  be  the  characteristics  of  their  progeny,  physi- 
cally, they  would  undoubtedly  and  invariably  inherit  and  transmit 
not  only  divided,  but  antagonistic,  instincts  that  would  require 
generations  of  careful  selection  and  training  to  get  rid  of.  While 
the  "featherheads"  may,  for  the  sake  of  personal  consistency, 
which  is  a  very  weighty  matter  of  public  concern,  still  advocate 
"more  running  blood  in  the  trotter;"  and  while  one  great  con- 
cern may  still  look  one  way,  on  this  question,  and  row  the  other, 
it  being  literally  true  that  she  has  not  added  a  single  drop  of 
running  blood  to  her  trotting  stud  in  a  quarter  of  a  century,  it 
is  safe  to  say  that  the  whole  body  of  intelligent  breeders  of  this 
country  have  come  to  accept  and  obey  the  great  central  truth 
that  the  American  trotter  has  reached  his  present  state  of  perfec- 
tion by  the  development  of  his  unbroken  and  undivided  trotting 
inheritances.  These  inheritances  have  been  cumulative  and  thus 
made  stronger  in  each  developed  generation  of  ancestors,  and  if 
this  high  development  of  speed  is  kept  up  for  a  series  of  succes- 
sive generations  the  speed  of  the  American  trotter  will  be  placed 
at  a  point  of  which  we  have  never  yet  dreamed.  The  inherited 
and  developed  instinct  to  stick  to  the  trot  as  the  fastest  gait  of 
which  the  horse  is  conscious,  coupled  with  skillful  preparation 


HOW   THE    TROTTING    HOKSE    IS    BRED.  515 

and  handling,  are  the  two  factors  that  will  always  put  the  Ameri- 
can trotting  horse  in  the  front  rank  and  keep  him  there. 

In  the  early  chapters  of  this  work  we  have  considered  the 
horse  in  his  original  habitat  and  his  distribution  among  the 
different  peoples  of  the  then  known  world,  but  we  have  not  con- 
sidered the  distribution  of  the  trotter  through  the  different 
regions  of  our  own  country.  Fifty  or  sixty  years  ago  the  trot- 
ting horse  was  hardly  known  outside  of  a  limited  territory  em- 
bracing the  cities  of  New  York  and  Philadelphia.  In  the  New 
England  States  the  trappy  little  Morgan  filled  the  place  of  the 
driving  horse  with  very  great  acceptance,  but  he  had  no  speed  as 
a  trotter.  We  then  began  to  see  and  hear  something  of  the 
" Maine  Messengers,"  that  were  trotters  in  reality  and  able  to 
demonstrate  their  speed  and  courage  on  the  track.  Occasionally 
a  converted  pacer  would  strike  a  trot  and  show  speed  that  was 
phenomenal  in  that  day,  but  it  was  uniformly  treated  as  "acci- 
dental." There  was  a  great  deal  of  high-class  trotting  blood  in 
the  region  of  Philadelphia,  and  for  a  time  that  was  the  leading 
center  of  the  trotting  interest,  but  it  did  not  receive  that  measure 
of  encouragement  and  support  that  was  necessary  to  its  permanent 
growth,  and  the  seat  of  empire  was  transferred  to  Long  Island 
and  Orange'  County,  New  York.  South  of  Mason  and  Dixon's 
line  the  trotter  was  tabooed,  as  a  mongrel  nondescript,  and  "not 
worthy  of  the  attention  of  a  gentleman,  sah."  They  had  run- 
ners and  they  had  pacers,  and  as  all  excellence  in  the  shape  of  a 
horse,  at  whatever  gait,  as  they  argued,  must  come  from  the 
running  horse  or  his  progenitor,  the  Arabian,  they  had  already 
the  very  best  material  in  the  world  for  the  production  of  the  fast 
trotter.  The  belief  as  expressed  in  their  motto,  "Speed  at  the 
gallop  was  a  guarantee  of  speed  at  any  other  gait  required,"  per- 
vaded all  minds  and  directed  all  action  in  matters  of  breeding. 
Thus  they  worked  away  for  years  trying  to  breed  trotters  from 
blood  that  never  could  and  that  never  did  trot,  and,  strange  as 
it  may  seem,  there  are  still  some  people  in  that  region,  at  the 
close  of  the  nineteenth  century,  trying  to  breed  trotters  from 
runners.  From  New  York  as  a  common  center  all  the  breeding 
States  obtained  their  supplies  of  trotting  blood,  and  they  in  time 
became  sources  of  supply.  The  only  exception  to  this  is  that  of 
the  pacer,  which  eventually  developed  into  a  trotting  element 
of  some  prominence  and  value,  especially  in  the  West  and  South. 

The  prominence  of  Kentucky  as  a  breeding  center  is  wholly 


516  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

due  to  the  trotting  blood  she  obtained  from  New  York.  She  had 
plenty  of  pacing  blood  that  was  good,  of  its  kind,  but  it  was  so 
uncertain  and  sporadic  that  it  did  not  commend  itself  to  the 
breeders  of  that  section  as  a  source  of  trotting  speed.  From  an 
early  period  in  the  history  of  the  State  the  habits  and  fancies  of 
the  people,  in  the  richer  portions,  had  been  "horsey,"  from  their 
knowledge  and  familiarity  with  running  races  for  many  years, 
and  thus  when  the  demand  came  for  trotters  they  struck  out 
vigorously  to  meet  that  demand.  When  Mr.  K.  A.  Alexander 
organized  the  great  Woodburn  Farm  he  established  a  department 
of  trotters,  which  was  among  the  very  first  of  any  magnitude  in 
the  State.  As  he  had  been  reared  abroad  he  knew  nothing  about 
American  pedigrees,  and  in  making  his  purchases  of  breeding 
stock  he  was  victimized  by  every  sharper  who  came  along  with  a 
brood  mare  to  sell.  He  was  a  man  of  honest  purpose  and  excel- 
lent natural  judgment  which  told  him  to  buy  such  breeding 
animals  as  could  trot  themselves  or  had  produced  trotters,  and  if 
he  had  been  content  to  stop  with  what  little  he  knew  of  their 
breeding  he  would  have  been  all  right;  but,  meantime,  the  pro- 
fessional pedigree-maker — the  successor  to  the  famous  Patrick 
Nesbitt  Edgar — came  along  and  tricked  them  out  in  an  excel- 
lent quality  of  pinchbeck  pedigrees  containing  plenty  of  running 
blood  that  had  never  trotted  nor  produced  a  trotter.  When  the 
first  Mr.  Alexander  died  he  was  succeeded  in  the  proprietorship 
of  the  great  estate  by  his  brother,  a  very  worthy  gentleman  who 
made  it  a  law  to  the  establishment  that  none  of  his  horses  should 
ever  start  in  a  race.  His  fancy  and  knowledge  were  all  in  the 
line  of  cattle,  and  he  seemed  to  neither  know  nor  care  anything 
about  horses.  Soon  after  this  change  in  the  ownership  of  the 
estate  a  new  manager  was  placed  in  charge,  and  it  was  soon 
manifest  that  however  absurd  and  untruthful  the  pedigrees  of 
breeding  stock  might  be,  they  must  not  be  questioned  nor  cor- 
rected by  any  authority  whatever.  This  doctrine  of  infallibility 
as  applied  to  Woodburn  pedigrees  was  wholly  incompatible  with 
what  I  conceived  to  be  my  duty  to  the  breeding  public.  I  had 
accepted  the  Woodburn  pedigrees,  at  the  start,  as  trustworthy, 
on  the  grounds  of  the  eminence  and  high  character  of  the  first 
Mr.  Alexander,  and  it  was  far  more  than  a  surprise  to  me  when 
I  discovered  something  of  the  extent  to  which  the  pedigrees  of 
the  whole  establishment  had  been  honeycombed  with  the  dis- 
honesty of  "sharpers"  and  "pedigree-makers."  These  fictions. 


HOW   THE   TEOTTING   HORSE   IS   BKED.  517 

antedated  any  compilation  or  known  authority  of  trotting  pedi- 
grees, and  there  can  be  no  doubt  they  were  accepted  as  honest 
statements  of  the  blood  of  the  animals  in  question,  while  many 
of  them  were  wholly  fictitious  and  all  of  them  contained  crosses 
on  the  maternal  side  that  were  merely  imaginary.  These  embel- 
lishments, to  call  them  by  no  harder  name,  were  uniformly  in 
one  and  the  same  direction,  all  stretching  out  to  embrace  as 
much  of  the  blood  of  the  running  horse  as  possible,  and  often  a 
great  deal  that  was  impossible.  Here  I  may  state  the  general 
fact  that  all  Kentuckiaus  had  claimed  and  exercised  the  right  so 
long  to  shape  up  their  pedigrees  to  suit  themselves  and  to  bring 
the  most  money  in  the  market  that  a  number  of  them  still 
•claimed  that  as  a  right  and  became  somewhat  restive  when  told 
that  their  pedigrees  would  be  recorded  just  as  far  as  they  were 
proved,  and  no  further.  Two  or  three  breeders  expostulated 
.against  this  rule,  and  in  reply  they  were  assured  that  they  had  a 
perfect  right  to  shape  their  pedigrees  as  they  pleased,  but  that  in- 
sertion in  the  Register  was  the  same  as  my  personal  indorsement, 
and  -that  this  indorsement  could  not  be  given  to  any  pedigree 
that  I  did  not  know  or  believe  to  be  honest  and  true.  This 
ended  all  doubts  about  the  position  and  character  of  the  Register, 
and  I  think  that  every  breeder  of  any  standing  in  Kentucky 
submitted  to  the  rule,  with  the  solitary  exception  of  Woodburn 
Farm.  The  manager  of  that  establishment  was  not  only  unwill- 
ing to  have  the  infallibility  of  Woodburn  pedigrees  called  in 
question,  but  he  aspired  to  the  control  of  the  pedigrees  of  all 
other  breeders  in  the  whole  country.  When  the  National  Asso- 
ciation of  Trotting  Horse  Breeders  was  organized  in  December, 
1876,  he  was* not  only  asked,  but  pressed,  to  become  a  member 
and  take  part  in  its  management  and  control.  But  no,  he  would 
be  "boss,"  or  he  would  be  nothing.  New  York  was  not  the 
right  place  to  organize  it.  It  should  be  organized  in  Kentucky, 
and  with  the  manager  of  Woodburn  at  the  head  of  it.  The 
arrogance  of  this  young  manager  was  something  amazing,  his 
intrigues  to  get  control  of  registration  were  continued  for  a  num- 
ber of  years,  and  the  means  employed  to  accomplish  his  ends 
were  of  such  a  character  as  clearly  to  demonstrate  that  of  all  the 
men  in  the  world  he  was  the  last  one  who  should  be  placed  in 
the  control  of  such  a  trust.  As  this  controversy  extended 
through  the  period  of  building  up  the  breed  of  trotters,  it  is  of 
necessity  a  part  of  the  literature  of  the  formation  of  that  breed, 


518  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

and  as  some  of  the  more  salient  points  seem  to  be  of  sufficient 
importance  to  hand  down  to  future  generations,  I  will  here  con- 
sider them  very  briefly.  In  doing  this  I  am  conscious  of  some 
feeling  of  embarrassment  on  account  of  the  personal  matters  that 
must  enter  into  the  recital,  but  it  is  a  part  of  the  trotting  history 
of  the  times,  and  I  prefer  that  the  truth  may  be  preserved,  what- 
ever may  be  the  teachings  of  the  canons  of  taste. 

In  the  collection  and  registration  of  pedigrees  that  seemed  to 
be  more  or  less  closely  allied  to  trotting  blood,  embracing  all 
contained  in  the  first,  second  and  third  volumes  of  the  "Trotting 
Register,"  there  was  no  guide  or  rule  to  determine  what  was 
worthy  of  registration,  in  a  trotting  sense,  and  what  was  un- 
worthy. I  had  a  general  conception  of  the  families  that  had 
produced  trotters  and  those  that  had  not,  but  I  had  no  rule  by 
which  I  could  decide  what  to  admit  and  what  to  reject,  except 
that  all  actual  performers  of  reputable  speed  must  be  admitted. 
To  undertake,  on  individual  responsibility,  to  determine  what 
amount  of  trotting  blood  should  be  requisite  to  admission,  and 
how  that  amount  should  be  measured,  was  quite  too  hazardous, 
except  when  backed  by  a  strong  moral  and  numerical  force  of 
breeders.  Hence  my  active  interest  in  the  organization  of  the 
National  Association  of  Trotting  Horse  Breeders,  and  my  earnest 
desire  that  it  might  be  composed  of  breeders  of  high  standing 
and  character  from  all  parts  of  the  country.  Upon  the  organiza- 
tion of  the  association,  its  character  was  so  entirely  acceptable  to 
me  that  I  did  not  hesitate  to  place  in  its  hands  the  supervisory  con- 
trol of  the  registration  of  pedigrees  for  the  ''Trotting  Register," 
to  be  exercised  by  a  Board  of  Censors  to  be  appointed  annually. 
The  first  board  was  appointed  and  entered  on  its  functions  Janu- 
ary 15,  1877,  by  formulating  the  first  set  of  rules  relating  to  the 
requisites  necessary  to  the  acceptance  of  pedigrees,  in  their  form 
and  completeness.  The  third  volume  was  then  approaching 
completion  and  the  Board  of  Censors  commenced  their  super- 
visory duties  on  that  volume. 

The  members  of  the  Breeders'  Association  were  generally  men 
of  intelligence,  and  capable  of  thinking,  and  every  suitable  op- 
portunity was  improved  to  get  their  individual  views  on  the  ques- 
tion as  to  whether  a  set  of  rules  could  be  adopted  by  the  associa- 
tion that  would  distinguish  between  animals  that  had  trotted 
themselves  or  produced  trotters  in  say  2:30,  and  animals  that 
had  not.  Not  many  had  ever  thought  of  the  subject,  but  all 


HOW   THE  TROTTING    HORSE   IS   BRED.  519 

were  ready  to  think  of  it  more.  The  only  objection  urged  was 
that  such  a  scheme  would  certainly  reduce  the  fees  for  registra- 
tion in  large  degree.  To  this  I  assented  as  doubtless  true  for  the 
time  being,  though  in  the  end  it  would  largely  increase  them, 
but  declared  that  it  was  not  for  the  fees  I  was  working,  but  to 
establish  a  breed  of  trotting  horses.  When  satisfied  that  a  good 
number  of  the  leading  breeders  were  thinking  favorably  of  the 
subject,  it  was  presented  to  the  public  in  a  very  modest  and  un- 
pretentious way.  In  discussing  "The  Future  of  the  Breeders' 
Association,"  in  Wallace's  Monthly  for  April,  1878,  the  following 
language  occurs: 

"  Iii  addition  to  the  thought  and  labor  necessary  to  secure  such  an  organiza- 
tion as  the  interest  demands,  there  is  another  topic  that  will  require  great 
deliberation  and  wisdom,  in  the  near  future.  The  association  must  fix  a  stand- 
ard of  admission  to  the  official  record  of  pedigrees.  Up  to  the  present  time 
there  has  been  no  standard  of  blood  requisite  to  secure  a  place  in  the  Register. 
This  matter  has  been  left  wholly  to  the  compiler,  without  even  so  much  as 
advice  on  the  subject.  The  Register,  therefore,  has  no  value  as  a  classifica- 
tion of  blood,  but  only  as  a  reliable  record  of  the  pedigrees  of  the  animals  it 
contains,  whatever  their  blood  may  be." 

This  is  the  first  intimation  ever  given  to  the  public,  so  far  as 
I  know,  that  any  body  of  men  ever  contemplated  the  con- 
struction of  a  standard  to  control  the  admission  of  trotting  horses 
to  specific  rank  and  registration.  The  question  was  thus  placed 
openly  before  the  public  and  it  was  looked  upon  favorably  by 
those  most  immediately  interested.  In  due  time,  at  a  meeting 
of  the  Breeders'  Association,  a  committee  was  appointed  to  whom 
was  referred  all  the  suggestions  that  had  been  made  for  the  pro- 
posed scheme.  Soon  afterward  (November  19,  1879)  the  com- 
mittee reported  the  standard  to  a  large,  enthusiastic  and  har- 
monious meeting  of  the  Association,  and  it  was  unanimously 
adopted  as  follows: 

THE  STANDARD  OF  ADMISSION  TO   REGISTRATION. 

(Established  by  the  National  Association  of  Trotting-Horse  Breeders, 
November  19,  1879.) 

In  order  to  define  what  constitutes  a  trotting-bred  horse,  and  to  establish  a 
BREED  of  trotters  on  a  more  intelligent  basis,  the  following  rules  are  adopted 
to  control  admission  to  the  records  of  pedigrees.  When  an  animal  meets  the 
requirements  of  admission  and  is  duly  registered,  it  shall  be  accepted  as  a 
standard  trotting-bred  animal. 


520  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

FIRST. — Any  stallion  that  has,  himself,  a  record  of  two  minutes  and  thirty 
seconds  (2:30)  or  better;  provided  any  of  his  get  has  a  record  of  2:40 or  better; 
or  provided  his  sire  or  his  dam,  his  grandsire  or  his  grandam,    is  already  a 
standard  animal. 
*    SECOND. — Any  mare  or  gelding  that  has  a  record  of  2:30  or  better. 

THIRD. — Any  horse  that  is  the  sire  of  two  animals  with  a  record  of  2:30  or 
better. 

FOURTH. — Any  horse  that  is  the  sire  of  one  animal  with  a  record  of  2:30  or 
better;  provided  he  has  either  of  the  following  additional  qualifications  : 

1. — A  record  himself  of  2:40  or  better. 

2. — Is  the  sire  of  two  other  animals  with  a  record  of  2:40  or  better. 

3. — Has  a  sire  or  dam,  grandsire  or  grandam  that  is  already  a  standard 
animal. 

FIFTH. — Any  mare  that  has  produced  an  animal  with  a  record  of  2:30  or 
better. 

SIXTH. — The  progeny  of  a  standard  horse  when  out  of  a  standard  mare. 

SEVENTH.— The  progeny  of  a  standard  horse  out  of  a  mare  by  a  standard 
horse. 

EIGHTH. — The  progeny  of  a  standard  horse  when  out  of  a  mare  whose  dam 
is  a  standard  mare. 

NINTH. — Any  mare  that  has  a  record  of  2;40  or  better,  and  whose  sire  or 
dam,  grandsire  or  grandam  is  a  standard  animal. 

TENTH. — A  record  to  wagon  of  2:35  or  better  shall  be  regarded  as  equal  to 
a  2:30  record. 

In  this,  its  original  form,  the  standard  was  administered  suc- 
cessfully and  smoothly  through  the  period  of  the  compilation  of 
volumes  four,  five,  six,  and  seven  of  the  "Trotting  Register/' 
when  it  was  revised  by  the  Breeders'  Association  as  follows: 

THE   STANDARD. 

(AS  REVISED   AND   ADOPTED   BY   THE  NATIONAL   ASSOCIATION   OF   TROTTING- 
HORSE   BREEDERS,    DECEMBER   14,    1887.) 

In  order  to  define  what  constitutes  a  trotting  bred  horse  and  to  establish  a 
BREED  of  trotters  on  a  more  intelligent  basis,  the  following  rules  are  adopted 
to  control  admission  to  the  records  of  pedigrees.  When  an  animal  meets  the 
requirements  of  admission  and  is  duly  registered  it  shall  be  accepted  as  a 
standard  trotting-bred  animal. 

FIRST. — Any  stallion  that  has  himself  a  record  of  two  minutes  and  thirty 
seconds  (2:BO)  or  better,  provided  any  of  his  get  has  a  record  of  2:35  or  better, 
or  provided  his  sire  or  his  dam  is  already  a  standard  animal. 

SECOND. — Any  mare  or  gelding  that  has  a  record  of  2:30  or  better. 

THIRD. — Any  horse  that  is  the  sire  of  two  animals  with  a  record  of  2:30  or 
better. 

FOURTH. — Any  horse  that  is  the  sire  of  one  animal  with  a  record  of  2:30  or 
better,  provided  he  has  either  of  the  following  additional  qualifications:  (1)  A 
record  himself  of  2:35  or  better.  (2)  Is  the  sire  of  two  other  animals  with  a 


HOW  THE  TROTTING    HORSE    IS   BRED.  521 

record  of  2:35  or  better.  (3)  Has  a  sire  or  dain  that  is  already  a  standard 
animal. 

FIFTH. — Any  mare  that  has  produced  an  animal  with  a  record  of  2:30  or 
better. 

SIXTH. — The  progeny  of  a  standard  horse  when  out  of  a  standard  mare. 

SEVENTH. — The  female  progeny  of  a  standard  horse  when  out  of  a  niare  by 
a  standard  horse. 

EIGHTH. — The  female  progeny  of  a  standard  horsa  when  out  of  a  mare 
whose  dam  is  a  standard  mare. 

NINTH. — Any  mare  that  has  a  record  of  2:35  or  better,  and  whose  sire  or 
dam  is  a  standard  animal. 

From  the  indefinite  and  unsatisfactory  starting  point,  and 
without  any  rule  or  guide  as  to  what  should  be  admitted,  except 
the  pointless  phrase,  "well  related  to  trotting  blood,"  it  soon  be- 
came evident  that  the  Register  would  soon  contain  as  much  chaff 
as  wheat.  Through  the  Monthly,  which  was  established  for 
that  purpose,  I  did  not  despair  of  the  success  of  my  aim  in  lead- 
ing the  intelligent  breeders  of  the  country  up  to  the  point  of 
recognizing  and  establishing  the  American  trotting  horse  as  a 
BREED.  The  road  was  long,  steep,  rough  in  places,  and  beset 
with  prejudices  on  all  sides,  but  labor  conquers  all  things,  and 
we  have  in  the  standard  and  its  revision,  as  given  above,  the 
culmination  and  perfection  of  the  implements  that  were  to  effect 
this  purpose.  To  reject  a  horse  from  registration  merely  because 
he  was  running  bred  would  have  been  "flying  in  the  face"  of  the 
prejudices  of  nearly  everybody,  but  to  reject  him  because  neither 
he  nor  any  of  his  tribe  had  ever  been  able  to  trot,  was  philosoph- 
ical and  just;  and  as  it  gave  no  section  of  the  country  an  advan- 
tage over  any  other  section,  and  no  theory  an  advantage  over  a 
fact,  no  man  could  gainsay  or  criticise  its  justice  or  its  truthful- 
ness. This  was  the  wedge  that  split  the  rock  of  ignorance  and 
prejudice,  and  thus  exploded  the  theories  of  generations  as  to  the 
value  of  running  blood  in  the  trotter.  As  I  look  at  it  to-day, 
the  undertaking  to  gather  up  a  great  lot  of  fragments  and  con- 
vert them  into  a  breed  was  a  tremendous  one,  and  although  it 
was  backed  up  with  brains  and  influence,  it  is  doubtful  whether 
many  of  its  promoters  had  any  very  clear  conception  of  the  re- 
sults that  would  follow — either  its  success  or  its  failure.  It 
assumed  to  direct  and  control  the  trotting-horse  breeding  interest 
of  the  whole  country,  and  to  leave  its  impress  for  all  time.  It 
required  no  gift  of  prophecy  to  see  this  as  the  result  of  success, 
and  neither  did  it  require  any  gift  of  prophecy  to  foresee  that 


522  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

failure  would  wipe  out  the  work  already  done  in  both  the  Regis- 
ter and  the  Monthly.  It  was  the  crucial  period  in  the  history  of 
these  publications.  A  misstep  or  an  unwise  provision  would 
have  brought  a  disastrous  end.  To  found  a  breed  of  horses  rest- 
ing primarily  and  wholly  upon  performance  and  the  blood  de- 
scended directly  from  performers,  or  the  producers  of  performers, 
was  something  that  never  had  been  attempted  in  the  world.  The 
basis  was  wholly  unique,  but  it  commended  itself  to  the  public 
judgment  as  a  just  one,  and  as  the  only  foundation  upon  which 
the  proposed  breed  could  be  successfully  established.  The  basis 
was  wisely  chosen  and  the  superstructure  erected  thereon  was 
equally  wise  in  all  its  provisions.  Never  have  we  known  a  set  of 
men  to  work  more  earnestly  or  more  unselfishly  for  the  common 
purpose. 

After  very  careful  consideration  in  a  large  and  intelligent  com- 
mittee, the  finished  labors  of  that  committee  was  reported  to  the 
Association  on  November  19,  1879,  at  the  Everett  House,  in  this 
city,  and  the  standard  was  then  and  there  adopted  without  so 
much  as  a  question  and  without  a  voice  or  a  vote  being  raised 
against  it.  Thus  the  standard  was  launched  in  unity  and  wis- 
dom, and  from  that  day  it  went  forward  on  its  mission  of  educat- 
ing the  people.  The  "Trotting  Register"  has  done  much  and  the 
Monthly  has  done  something  in  the  way  of  education,  but  the 
standard  has  been  the  special  formula  through  which  all  these 
teachings  have  been  brought  home  to  the  breeder,  great  and 
small,  in  a  manner  that  educated  both  his  mind  and  his  pocket. 
If  we  could  conceive  of  the  brightest  mind  directing  the  most 
pointed  pen  for  the  period  of  a  hundred  years  in  the  special 
department  of  how  to  breed  the  trotting  horse,  we  feel  sure  he 
would  fail  to  accomplish  as  much  as  this  little,  practical  formula 
called  the  "Standard"  accomplished  in  the  first  dozen  years  of 
its  existence. 

When  the  standard  was  adopted  and  put  in  operation  there  was 
a  material  advance  in  the  market  value  of  all  animals  registered 
under  its  requirements,  and  it  thus  became  not  only  a  matter  of 
honor,  but  of  profit,  to  breed  only  in  the  standard  ranks.  Every- 
body was  willing  to  pay  more  for  a  good  horse  that  was  standard 
in  his  breeding  than  for  one  equally  good  that  was  not  standard 
in  his  breeding.  A  record  of  '2:30  was  then  accepted  as  evidence 
of  a  high  rate  of  speed,  everywhere.  There  was  a  grand  rush  for 
standard  rank  and  the  number  of  fraudulent  performances  sent 


HOW   THE   TROTTING   HORSE   IS   BRED.  523 

forward  in  order  to  secure  such  classification  was  overwhelming. 
This  led  to  many  rejections  of  performances,  adroitly  shaped  up 
to  deceive,  and  every  rejection  made  a  batch  of  enemies.  But 
great  as  this  evil  was,  there  was  another  that  began  to  manifest 
itself  very  strongly.  The  Eegister  was  rapidly  filling  up  with 
colts  under  rules  seven  and  eight,  and  every  one  of  them,  as  soon 
as  he  was  able  to  stand  up,  wanted  his  number,  for  he  was  to  be 
kept  as  a  standard  stallion.  The  public  attention  was  urgently 
called  to  the  preponderating  numbers  of  these  feebly  bred  colts, 
as  a  menace  to  the  hitherto  unimpeded  progress  of  the  grand 
purpose  of  establishing  a  breed.  The  Breeders'  Association 
thereupon  took  up  the  standard  and  revised  it,  wholly  in  the 
direction  of  higher  qualifications  and  more  stringent  require- 
ments. By  comparing  the  revised  standard  with  the  original, 
above,  it  will  be  observed  that  rule  ten  was  stricken  out,  and 
that  rules  seven  and  eight  were  restricted  to  fillies  only,  thus 
cutting  off  the  source  of  danger  altogether.  The  rates  of  sub- 
sidiary speed  were  advanced  and  there  was  a  tightening  up  of  the 
requirements  in  other  directions.  This  revision  did  not  suit  all 
interests,  especially  beginners  who  were  just  starting  to  breed 
their  first  colt  by  a  standard  horse,  but  as  every  one  knew  there 
would  never  be  a  time  when  there  would  not  be  just  such  ground- 
less complaints,  the  action  received  the  hearty  indorsement  and 
support  of  all  breeders  who  kept  in  view  the  central  object  of 
the  standard  in  building  up  a  breed  of  trotters. 

When  fast  horses  began  to  multiply  by  the  thousand,  annually, 
say  about  1890-91,  we  began  to  hear  an  increasing  number  of 
gibes  at  the  standard  as  "a  slow  coach,"  "away  behind  the  times," 
"a  2:30  horse  was  no  longer  considered  a  trotter,"  etc.,  and 
every  one  of  these  taunts  had  an  element  of  truth  in  it.  The 
standard,  as  the  teacher  of  the  breeders  of  the  country,  had  not 
only  produced  trotters,  but  great  trotters,  with  marvelous  rapid- 
ity. At  one  time  it  was  the  ambition  of  all  breeders  to  place 
their  stock  inside  of  the  limits  of  the  standard,  not  only  because 
it  was  an  honor,  but  because  it  added  materially  to  the  bank  ac- 
count and  to  the  value  of  every  animal,  so  bred,  in  the  establish- 
ment. But  breeders  both  great  and  small  are  no  longer  stimu- 
lated to  enter  a  standard  with  the  antiquated  2:30  rate  of  speed 
that  is  everywhere  received  with  a  sneer.  When  the  standard 
was  formed  on  the  basis  of  2:30,  it  was  within  about  fifteen 
seconds  of  the  fastest  performance,  and  if  the  same  ratio  were 


524  THE    HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

now  preserved,  "2:30"  would  be  stricken  out  and  "2:20"  inserted 
instead.  The  breeders  would  again  be  stimulated  to  look  forward 
with  hope,  and  not  backward  with  regret. 

Of  the  numerous  criticisms  of  the  standard  after  its  adoption, 
there  were  none  of  any  special  force  or  practicability,  but  from 
one  source  there  was  a  persistent  war  made  upon  it,  not  because 
it  was  unfair  in  its  principles  or  administration,  nor  because  it 
lacked  vigor  in  its  support,  but  evidently  because  it  was  not  con- 
trolled in  Kentucky,  and  that  the  pivotal  authority  of  that  con- 
trol was  not  placed  in  the  hands  of  the  manager  at  Woodburn. 
It  is  but  just  that  I  should  say  here  that  many  of  the  stanchest 
and  most  enthusiastic  supporters  of  the  standard  and  the  Register 
were  Kentuckians,  and  with  the  exceptions  of  two  or  three 
breeders  who  stood  well  in  their  community,  and  a  few  others 
who  were  bankrupt  in  character  and  morals,  there  were  no 
enemies  to  engage  in  this  war.  I  would  gladly  skip  over  this 
period,  for  it  is  of  necessity  more  or  less  personal,  but  to  omit  it 
would  leave  the  history  of  the  times  and  of  the  formation  of  the 
breed  of  trotters  incomplete,  and  liable  to  misrepresentation  by 
those  who  may  come  after  us. 

The  first  public  suggestion  or  demand  for  a  standard,  and 
the  first  use  of  the  word  "standard"  in  connection  with  rules  for 
registration,  was  addressed  to  the  Breeders'  Association,  in  the 
paragraph  quoted  above,  from  the  Monthly  for  April,  1878.  In 
that  paragraph,  while  no  specific  rules  were  formulated,  the 
whole  scope  of  such  rules  was  foreshadowed. 

In  the  course  of  correspondence  with  breeders  all  over  the 
country  as  to  their  views  about  the  provisions  of  the  proposed 
standard,  I  received  from  Mr.  Henry  C.  McDowell,  of  Kentucky, 
a  little  slip  of  paper,  perhaps  as  large  as  your  hand,  marked 
"copyrighted,"  on  which  were  printed  a  number  of  rules  that 
purported  to  be  rules  for  the  admission  of  certain  animals,  trot- 
ters and  runners,  to  some  book  that  was  not  named  or  described. 
This  little  paper  was  courteously  received  and  commended  as  a 
step  in  the  right  direction. 

The  idea  of  inserting  the  word  "copyrighted"  seemed  to  be 
that  it  might  serve  as  a  "scare  head"  and  thus  deter  all  makers 
of  books  from  attempting  to  make  a  book  under  the  provisions  of 
these  rules.  These  rules  were  strictly  tentative,  and  they  were 
peddled  about  for  months,  and  changed  several  times  to  see- 


HOW   THE   TROTTING    HORSE   IS   BRED.  525 

whether  they  would  be  acceptable  or  not,  and  every  revised  and 
corrected  edition  was  marked  "copyrighted." 

Some  of  the  rules  that  were,  we  might  say,  self-evident,  were 
not  very  objectionable,  but  others  again  were  simply  intended  to 
give  Woodburn  and  those  who  had  their  breeding  stock  from  that 
establishment  a  great  advantage  over  all  other  breeders.  The 
selfish  object  of  the  fourth  rule  is  palpable,  as  follows:  "Any 
mare,  the  dam  of  any  mare  or  stallion  that  has  produced  or  sired 
a  horse,  mare  or  gelding,  with  a  record  of  two  minutes  and  thirty 
seconds  or  better." 

To  the  original  draft  of  six  rules,  "rule  seven"  was  afterward 
added,  which  reads:  "The  full  sister  of  any  animal  entered  under 
rules  one,  two,  three,  and  four."  This  was  the  capsheaf  of  ab- 
surdity, for  it  not  only  made  the  grandams  of  trotters  standard 
trotting  brood  mares,  but  all  their  sisters  also.  This  not  only 
embraced  a  large  number  of  running  mares,  genuine  and  bogus 
alike,  in  Kentucky,  but  it  reached  across  the  Atlantic  and  made 
one  of  the  greatest  of  English  dams  of  running  horses,  and  all 
her  famous  sisters,  standard  trotting  brood  mares  in  America. 
Bonnie  Scotland,  the  great  racing  sire,  never  was  able  to  get  a 
trotter  except  from  old  Waterwitch,  and  upon  the  strength  of 
that  scratch,  his  sisters  and  his  mother  and  his  aunts  were  all 
made  standard  trotters.  No  wonder  this  marvelously  stupid 
production  came  to  be  known  as  the  "Pinafore  Standard."  [A 
more  extended  review  of  the  "Pinafore  Standard"  may  be  found 
in  Wallace's  Monthly  for  December,  1879,  page  831.] 

But  when  we  come  to  consider  the  ultimate  result  intended  to 
be  reached,  the  scheme  was  not  "marvelously  stupid" — it  was 
not  the  work  of  a  fool,  but  of  the  other  kind  of  fellow.  The 
admission  of  the  grandmothers  and  all  their  sisters  was  not 
specially  intended  to  bring  in  the  great  English  racing  mare  and 
all  her  sisters  as  standard-bred  American  trotters,  but  it  was  in- 
tended to  bring  in  a  great  host  of  Kentucky  running-bred  mares 
that  never  could  trot  a  mile  in  four  minutes,  and  place  them  on 
an  exact  equality  of  rank  with  mares  that  had  records  of  2:20  or 
less.  This  would  not  only  place  Kentucky  away  ahead  of  the 
North  in  the  length  of  her  lines  of  inheritance,  but  would  place 
Woodburn  away  above  all  competitors,  either  North  or  South,  and 
with  a  little  help  of  the  Edgar-Bruce  type,  we  would  soon  have 
had  "twelfth  dam,  fifteenth  dam/7  etc.,  not  one  of  them  named 
and  not  one  of  them  honest.  Great  local,  and  especially  personal, 


526  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

advantages  were  to  accrue,  and  the  theory  that  Kentucky  run- 
ning blood  was  not  the  best  trotting  blood  in  the  world  was  to  be 
smashed,  and  here  we  reach  "the  milk  in  the  cocoanut."  So 
far  as  we  can  understand  the  conditions  as  they  then  existed  and 
so  far  as  we  can  analyze  the  facts  developed,  this  seems  to  be  a 
fair  interpretation  of  the  impelling  motive.  In  an  unfortunate 
hour  I  took  up  this  bantling  of  the  young  manager  and  exposed 
its  absurdities,  addressing  the  exposure  to  a  highly  esteemed 
personal  friend  whose  name  was  connected  with  the  movement, 
and  just  as  soon  as  the  gentlemen  interested  could  be  got  to- 
gether, every  vestige  of  the  "Pinafore"  features  was  eliminated, 
the  poor  old  grandmothers  and  their  sisters  being  ruthlessly 
turned  out  in  the  cold.  This  was  the  first  set-back  which  Mr. 
Brodhead  received  in  his  enterprise,  which  was  to  accomplish  so 
much  for  Woodburn,  and  which  ended  so  disastrously. 

There  was  another  feature  embraced  in  the  "Pinafore,"  and 
protected  by  the  same  "copyright,"  that  was  of  special  signifi- 
cance. It  was  provided  that  time  made  in  a  public  trial,  against 
the  watch,  should  be  accepted  as  of  equal  value  with  time  made 
in  a  race  with  other  horses.  It  is  not  worth  while  to  stop  to  con- 
sider the  question  as  to  whether  these  two  kinds  of  performance 
are  of  equal  merit,  and  should  receive  equal  honor,  for  every 
honest  man  will  call  such  a  claim  a  bald  absurdity  on  its  face. 
Then  why  has  Woodburn,  from  time  immemorial,  it  will  be 
asked,  always  refused  to  enter  a  colt  in  a  stake  or  start  one 
against  others?  If  you  ask  the  manager  he  will  tell  you  that  Mr. 
Alexander,  the  owner,  is  opposed  to  racing  in  all  its  forms.  Then 
why  does  Woodburn,  in  one  form  or  other,  hold  so  much  stock 
in  the  Kentucky  Breeders'  Association,  one  of  the  most  notorious 
gambling  concerns  in  the  whole  country?  We  will  not  press  this 
question  too  closely.  There  can  be  no  shadow  of  doubt,  there- 
fore, that  this  feature  of  the  "Pinafore"  was  the  special  product 
of  the  mind  of  the  manager  at  Woodburn,  for  no  one  of  the  other 
gentlemen  would  be  willing  to  own  it. 

The  quasi-organization  from  which,  nominally,  the  "Pina- 
fore Standard"  emanated  consisted  of  the  five  gentlemen  follow- 
ing: Lucas  Brodhead,  Henry  C.  McDowell,  Richard  S.  Veech, 
James  C.  McFerran,  and  Colonel  Eichard  West.  The  names  of 
these  five  gentlemen  when  appended  to  any  matter  connected 
with  their  enterprise  and  given  to  the  public  had  no  rank  assigned 
to  them,  except  "Committee  on  Rules."  This  implied  that 


HOW    THE   TROTTING    HORSE    IS    BRED.  527 

there  was  an  organization  behind  them  that  had  appointed  them 
to  this  duty,  but  there  never  was  even  a  shadow  of  such  an  or- 
ganization. Mr.  Brodhead  was  manager  at  Woodburn  and  am- 
bitious to  control  the  trotting  pedigrees  of  the  whole  country, 
and  for  the  methods  employed  the  reader  is  referred  to  page  430 
of  this  volume.  Mr.  McDowell  is  simply  Mr.  Brodhead's  echo. 
In  December,  1877,  he  attended  the  annual  meeting  of  the  Na- 
tional Association  of  Trotting  Horse  Breeders,  and  out  of  com- 
pliment to  Kentucky  he  was  elected  president.  He  was  about 
the  city  two  or  three  days,  and  before  he  left  for  home  he  resigned 
without  ever  intimating  any  reason  why  he  resigned.  Mr.  Veech 
is  a  man  of  undoubted  integrity  and  plenty  of  brains,  and  was 
identified  with  the  Breeders'  Association  from  the  start.  Mr. 
McFerrau  and  Colonel  West  are  both  dead,  and  while  it  was  not 
my  privilege  to  know  them  intimately,  I  knew  enough  of  them 
to  trust  them  as  honorable  and  honest  men.  Not  long  after  the 
appearance  of  the  original  suggestion  in  the  Monthly,  as  given 
above,  that  a  standard  of  qualifications  for  admission  to  registra- 
tion was  of  paramount  importance,  and  that  the  preparation  of 
such  a  standard  was  in  the  special  province  of  the  National  Asso- 
ciation of  Trotting  Horse  Breeders,  Manager  Brodhead  caught 
the  idea  and  the  situation,  and  with  Mr.  McDowell  hurried  away 
to  spend  a  night  with  Mr.  Veech,  near  Louisville,  and  thus  fore- 
stall the  action  the  Breeders'  Association  might  take  in  the 
premises.  They  were  all  of  one  mind  as  to  the  importance  of 
keeping  Kentucky  in  the  foremost  position  as  a  breeding  State, 
but  they  were  not  all  of  one  mind  as  to  the  means  best  adapted 
to  that  end.  Mr.  Veech  was  very  clear  and  pronounced  in  his 
views  that  the  way  to  breed  the  trotter  was  to  go  to  the  trotter 
and  not  to  the  runner,  but  what  Brodhead  said  McDowell  said, 
and  that  left  him  in  the  minority.  Seated  around  a  table,  each 
with  a  copy  of  Wallace's  Monthly  containing  the  table  of  2:30 
trotters  under  their  sires,  they  commenced  forming  some  rules. 
With  "The  Great  Table"  before  them  they  could  not  fail  to  strike 
the  self-evident  requirements  of  a  standard,  and  two  or  three  of 
their  rules  were  very  good,  but  as  a  matter  of  course  the  scheme 
of  the  majority  to  get  in  all  the  running-bred  mares  possible  and 
enter  them  as  standard  trotting  mares  had  to  prevail.  Hence 
the  provision  for  admitting  the  grandams.  Imported  Bonnie 
Scotland  was  kept  many  years  in  the  trotting  latitudes,  and  just 
got  one  trotter  and  no  more  at  any  rate  of  speed,  hence  he  was  a 


528  THE    HOUSE    OF    AMERICA. 

standard  horse  according  to  this  scheme,  and  his  dam,  Queen 
Mary,  in  England,  was  a  standard  trotting  brood  mare.  Now  if 
the  dam  thus  became  a  standard  trotting  mare,  why  should  not 
lago,  his  sire,  become  a  standard  trotting  sire?  This  would  have 
been  too  glaring  and  open,  and  would  have  been  ridiculed  as  an 
absurdity  by  everybody.  The  trick  had  to  be  carried  through 
quietly  or  it  could  not  succeed.  At  a  later  period  the  sisters  of 
all  the  standard  mares  were  made  standard,  and  then  came  the 
very  appropriate  and  expressive  title  of  the  "Pinafore  Standard," 
for  it  literally  embraced  "his  sisters  and  his  mother  and  his 
aunts."  This  scheme  would  have  admitted  a  vast  herd  of  so-called 
trotting  mares  in  Kentucky  that  had  no  trotting  inheritance,  had 
never  trotted  themselves,  and  never  produced  a  trotter.  This 
part  of  the  scheme  was  certainly  not  the  work  of  the  "Commit- 
tee on  Rules,"  but  the  work  of  an  individual  for  the  purpose  of 
'carrying  out  a  selfish  and  inadmissible  scheme  to  promote 
local  and  personal  interests.  When  the  exposure  of  this  scheme 
came  out  Woodburn,  with  all  its  influence  in  Kentucky,  could 
not  stand  against  it  an  hour,  and  every  "Pinafore"  feature  was 
promptly  eliminated. 

When  the  processes  of  emendation  and  change  in  the  "Pina- 
fore," arid  each  change  "copyrighted,"  were  going  forward,  the 
views  of  the  different  members  of  the  "Committee  on  Rules"  did 
not  always  harmonize,  and  when  it  came  to  the  selection  of  a 
man  to  do  the  work,  part  of  the  committee  insisted  the  work 
should  be  placed  in  the  hands  of  John  H.  Wallace,  and  after 
some  discussion  a  committee  consisting  of  Mr.  Brodhead  and 
Mr.  McDowell  was  deputed  to  tender  this  work  to  Mr.  Wallace 
on  such  terms  as  would  be  equitable  and  just.  In  due  time  a 
communication  was  received  from  these  gentlemen,  informing 
me  of  the  business  upon  which  they  had  been  appointed  and 
wishing  to  know  for  what  compensation  I  would  engage  to  com- 
pile the  book,  laying  down  the  conditions  upon  which  it  must  be 
done.  Without  having  a  copy  of  this  correspondence  before  me 
I  can  only  give  the  substance  from  memory.  First,  the  copy- 
right was  to  be  in  the  committee  or  some  member  of  it;  second, 
the  compilations  were  to  be  as  the  committee  directed;  and  third, 
the  book  was  to  be  the  property  of  the  committee  when  com- 
pleted. This  was  a  stunner,  but  I  concluded  to  play  out  the  role 
they  had  assigned  me  and  see  what  they  would  do.  In  my  reply 
I  put  the  case  substantially  as  follows:  "Your  proposed  book, 


HOW   THE   TROTTIXG    HORSE    IS    BRED.  529 

if  ever  made,  must  be  made  almost,  if  not  quite  wholly,  from  the 
first  three  volumes  of  the  "Trotting  Register,"  and  these  volumes 
are  carefully  protected  by  copyright.  J  have  spent  several  years 
of  hard  labor  in  compiling  them,  and  a  large  amount  of  money 
in  traveling  over  the  country  tracing  and  verifying  the  facts 
which  they  contain.  You  ask  me,  in  effect,  to  take  my  three 
volumes  and  to  skim  all  the  cream  out  of  them  to  make  one 
volume  for  you.  Now,  before  going  an  inch  further,  we  must 
understand  what  you  are  willing  to  pay  for  my  property,  before 
I  can  entertain  any  proposition  to  dump  it  into  the  lap  of  your 
committee."  Sometimes  I  have  been  disposed  to  lament  my 
hard  fate  in  coming  so  near  the  exalted  position  of  "hired-man" 
to  two  such  distinguished  characters  as  Henry  C.  McDowell  and 
Lucas  Brodhead,  but  I  missed  it.  To  this  letter  I  never  received 
any  reply,  nor  did  these  gentlemen  ever  make  any  report  of  their 
negotiations  with  me  to  the  "Committee  on  Rules." 

The  next  news  we  had  from  the  "Pinafore"  was  the  announce- 
ment that  the  book  would  be  compiled  at  Woodburn,  by  LeGrand 
Lucas,  and  on  inquiry  as  to  his  capacity  and  knowledge  of  the 
subject  it  was  learned  that  he  was  a  young  kinsman  of  Brod- 
head's,  perhaps  still  in  his  "teens,"  who  was  employed  there  as  a 
kind  of  clerk  or  bookkeeper.  He  was  evidently  an  innocent  lad, 
for  he  had  been  installed  in  his  new  office  only  a  very  few  days 
when  he  wrote  me  for  certain  numbers  of  the  Monthly,  in  dupli- 
cate. In  reply  I  wrote  him  that  each  volume  of  the  "Register" 
and  each  number  of  the  Monthly  was  legally  covered  by  copy- 
right and  that  I  could  not  consent  to  his  taking  my  property  to 
make  up  his  new  book,  and  that  he  must  do  as  I  had  done — com- 
mence at  the  beginning  and  hunt  for  himself.  Poor  boy,  what 
could  he  do?  If  he  were  debarred  from  the  use  of  the  Wallace 
publications,  where  on  the  face  of  the  globe  could  he  get  the 
information?  If  cribbing  had  to  be  done  in  order  to  carry  out 
the  scheme,  it  would  be  very  indiscreet  to  do  it  under  the  very 
roof  of  Woodburn  and  under  the  supervision  of  its  manager. 
Thus  the  work  languished  for  months,  and  little  or  no  progress 
was  made. 

In  Chicago  there  was  one  James  H.  Sanders,  publishing  a 
paper,  whom  I  had  known  for  years.  He  never  had  an  idea  of 
his  own  in  the  world,  but  he  was  one  of  the  most  notorious  and 
shameless  plagiarists  that  I  have  ever  known.  As  an  illustration 
of  what  I  knew  about  him  in  this  department  of  industry  and 


530  THE    HOUSE    OF    AMERICA. 

thought,  I  will  give  a  single  example  that  will  honestly  represent- 
many  others  in  my  own  experience.  At  one  time  he  was  em- 
ployed several  months  as  editor  of  Wilkes'  Spirit  of  the  Times, 
and  during  that  time  I  wrote  an  article  for  that  paper  that  had 
some  pith  and  point  in  it,  but  I  was  afraid  to  send  it  for  fear 
Sanders  would  steal  it,  so  I  called  in  a  capable  friend  and  told 
him  the  situation,  had  him  read  it  carefully  and  make  some  notes 
of  the  order  of  thought  that  he  might  know  it  if  he  ever  saw  it 
again.  The  paper  was  then  signed  and  sent  forward.  In  two  or 
three  days  I  received  an  acknowledgment  of  the  communication 
effusively  thankful  for  the  favor,  remarking  that  by  a  singular 
coincidence  our  minds  had  been  running  in  the  same  channel  and 
that  when  my  communication  was  received  he  already  had  an 
article  in  type  taking  the  same  view  of  the  subject.  When  the 
paper  came  my  friend  looked  it  over  and  remarked  "that  man  is 
nothing  more  than  a  shameless  plagiarist." 

In  a  short  time  work  on  the  book,  if  it  were  ever  begun,  came 
practically  to  an  end  for  want  of  material,  and  this  was  probably 
brought  about  by  a  hint  from  the  proprietor,  Mr.  Alexander,, 
that  Woodburn,  with  all  its  strength,  could  not  afford  to  sacrifice 
its  good  name  for  honesty,  by  taking  the  property  of  another 
man,  without  his  consent.  At  this  juncture  J.  H.  Sanders,  of 
Chicago,  wanted  a  job,  for  ready  money,  and  knowing  the  situa- 
tion in  Kentucky,  published  an  editorial  going  to  prove  that 
pedigrees  could  not  be  copyrighted,  for  they  belonged  to  the  own- 
ers of  the  horses,  or  some  other  such  brainless  argument  as  this. 
Brodhead  and  his  echo  saw  in  this  the  opportunity  of  their  lives,, 
for  Sanders  wanted  the  job,  and  if  my  work  were  to  be  appropriated 
they  could  blame  it  all  on  him.  So  they  hied  away  to  Chicago,  and 
the  three  worthies,  all  fully  inspired  with  the  animus  furandi, 
were  not  long  in  reaching  an  agreement.  Sanders  did  not  want 
any  share  in  the  book  or  in  the  profits  it  might  yield,  but  he 
was  ready  to  do  the  work  for  a  fixed  compensation,  in  cash,  and 
to  be  free  from  all  responsibility  for  damages  or  loss.  The  com- 
pensation, as  represented  by  Sanders,  was  three  thousand  dollars. 
The  negotiations  were  consummated,  announced  through  the 
press  with  a  brilliant  flourish  of  trumpets,  and  the  two  gentle- 
men returned  to  Kentucky  in  high  feather.  Work  on  the  com- 
pilation (?)  was  soon  commenced,  and,  as  related  by  an  eye- 
witness, the  methods  were  very  simple  and  expeditious.  Mr. 
Sanders  sat  at  one  side  of  a  table  with  the  three  volumes  of 


HOW    THE   TROTTING    HORSE   IS    BRED.  531 

"Wallace's  Trotting  Register,"  and  Wallace's  Monthly  open  be- 
fore him,  and  as  he  read  out  the  pedigrees  in  their  alphabetical 
order,  his  clerk,  on  the  opposite  side  of  the  table,  wrote  them 
down.  In  a  very  few  weeks  the  work  was  done  and  Sanders  put. 
his  three  thousand  dollars  in  his  pocket.  Thus  the  clerk  was  paid, 
his  employers  were  in  possession  of  his  dishonest  work,  and  J.  H. 
Wallace  was  robbed  of  the  labor  of  years,  but  the  instinctive 
honesty  of  the  public  conscience  had  not  yet  been  reckoned  with. 
The  book  was  published  under  the  title  of  "The  Breeder's 
Trotting  Stud  Book."  The  clerical  work  was  well  done,  closely 
following  the  copyrighted  sources  from  which  it  was  drawn,  so 
closely  indeed  as  to  furnish  strong  prima  facie  evidence  that  it 
was  copied.  But  this  feature  of  excellence,  if  that  word  can  be 
applied  to  theft  in  any  form,  furnished  literally  hundreds  of 
evidences,  clear,  unmistakable  and  conclusive,  that  from  begin- 
ning to  end  it  had  been  copied  from  the  "Register"  and  the 
Monthly.  Like  all  works  of  the  kind,  those  volumes  were  not 
free  from  errors,  the  spelling  of  a  name  might  be  wrong,  the 
initials  of  a  name  might  have  been  misplaced  or  reversed,  a  date 
or  a  location  may  have  been  incorrect,  and  as  all  these  errors  were 
copied  and  not  one  of  them  corrected,  and  there  were  hundreds 
of  them,  each  one  stood  up  as  a  competent  and  undisputed  wit- 
ness and  told  the  story  of  the  theft.  But,  knowing  the  character 
of  the  people  with  whom  I  had  to  deal,  I  was  prompted  to  adopt 
the  methods  of  the  detective  in  using  marked  bills,  and  then 
finding  those  bills  on  the  person  of  the  culprit.  Fortunately 
there  was  a  very  easy  way  of  applying  this  effective  and  conclu- 
sive method  and  I  adopted  it.  Instead  of  marking  bills,  I 
marked  pedigrees,  by  inserting  imaginary  crosses.  As  an  illus- 
tration, there  was  a  horse  in  Delaware  called  Frank  Pierce  Jr. 
Nobody  ever  knew  anything  about  the  blood  of  his  dam,  and  I 
supplied  the  place  with  "dam  by  Tom  Titmouse,  pacer,"  and 
then  waited  for  my  marked  pedigrees  to  make  their  appearance. 
Nobody  ever  heard  of  a  horse  called  "Tom  Titmouse"  in  Dela- 
ware or  any  other  country.  In  due  time  the  book  appeared  and 
there  my  "marked  bills"  came  to  light  in  the  possession  of  Lucas 
Brodhead  and  Henry  C.  McDowell.  The  piracy  was  a  clean  sweep 
and  the  evidence  of  it  was  just  as  complete  as  the  depredation 
itself.  As  a  matter  of  course  I  did  not  delay  in  raising  the  shout 
"stop  thief,"  and  after  one  or  two  broadsides  from  the  Monthly 
giving  the  extent  of  the  theft  and  examples  of  the  evidence  to 


532  THE    HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

sustain  the  charge,  the  moral  sense  of  the  breeders  of  the  whole 
country,  including  Kentucky,  was  aroused,  and  I  was  really  sur- 
prised at  the  sudden  death  of  the  bantling  and  its  burial  out  of 
sight,  but  still  more  surprised  that  no  man  opened  his  head  in 
explanation  or  defense  of  the  piracy,  and  thus  was  practically  con- 
fessed the  truth  of  all  that  was  charged  against  them.  It  is  said 
that  Mr.  Alexander,  the  proprietor  of  Woodburn,  tightened  the 
reins  on  his  over-ambitious  manager,  at  this  point,  and  admon- 
ished him  that  his  course  had  done  great  injury  to  the  good  name 
of  Woodburn,  and  that  he  must  change  it,  and  not  attempt  any 
defense  of  what  he  had  done.  Whether  this  really  occurred  or 
not  I  am  not  able  to  say,  but  it  was  just  such  a  course  as  any 
wise  employer  would  adopt  toward  a  reckless  employee  whose 
course  was  destroying  the  good  name  of  an  establishment.  It 
then  appeared  to  be  my  duty  to  go  forward  and  under  a  decree 
of  the  courts  have  this  stolen  property  confiscated  and  destroyed, 
according  to  law,  but  as  the  bantling  was  already  very  dead  and 
growing  deader  every  day,  with  nothing  left  of  it  but  a  trace  of 
its  putrescence  in  the  nostrils  of  all  honest  men,  I  concluded  that 
the  game  was  not  worth  the  candle. 

Among  the  amusing  things  that  were  developed  in  the  progress 
of  this  controversy  was  Mr.  Brodhead's  peculiar  views  as  to  what 
"copyright"  really  meant.  He  got  the  idea  of  restricting  admis- 
sion to  the  "Kegister"  to  animals  possessing  certain  qualifica- 
tions from  the  Monthly, 'and  he  formulated  this  idea  into  five  or 
six  rules,  expressed  in  eight  or  ten  short  printed  lines  and,  as  he 
claimed,  copyrighted  this  idea.  He  evidently  seemed  to  think 
he  had  invented  a  rat-trap  and  got  his  patent  on  it.  and  that  no 
man  dare  make  any  rules  restricting  registration,  so  long  as  he 
safely  held  the  patent  on  his  rat-trap.  He  could  see  no  differ- 
ence between  a  patent  right  and  a  copyright.  An  "idea"  cannot 
be  copyrighted,  no  difference  whether  it  be  expressed  in  one 
printed  line,  or  in  a  dozen.  The  copyright  law  is  constructed 
for  the  special  and  only  purpose  of  protecting  the  author  in  the 
results  and  products  of  his  labor.  The  work  of  seeking,  tracing 
and  establishing  the  pedigrees  of  trotting  horses  had  been  pushed 
forward  persistently,  laboriously  and  expensively  for  more  than 
twelve  years,  and  it  had  grown  into  a  vast  accumulation  of  facts 
of  imperishable  value  to  the  whole  horse  world,  and  every  line 
of  it  was  protected  under  the  copyright  law;  but  because  it  didn't 
conform  to  his  "rat-trap"  idea  he  seems  to  have  persuaded  him- 


HOW   THE   TROTTING    HORSE    IS    BRED.  533 

self  that  it  would  be  justifiable  to  hire  and  pay  a  man  to  transfer 
it  from  my  possession  to  his  own. 

During  its  very  short  life  and  while  the  memory  of  the  book 
was  retained  in  the  recollections  of  the  horsemen  of  that  period, 
it  was  very  generally,  if  not  invariably,  spoken  of  as  "The  Tom 
Titmouse  Stud  Book."  It  has  already  been  suggested  how  this 
name  would  aptly  fit  in  among  my  "marked  bills,"  but  the 
reason  for  it  has  not  been  made  apparent.  In  Warren's  romance 
called  "Ten  Thousand  a  Year,"  his  "delectable,"  or  to  speak 
soberly,  his  "detestable"  hero  was  named  "Tittlebat  Titmouse," 
and  as  one  of  the  gentlemen  involved  in  this  controversy  strongly 
reminded  me  of  Warren's  hero,  by  his  arrogance  and  ignorance, 
I  involuntarily  wrote  in  the  "marked  bill"  "dam  by  Tittlebat 
Titmouse;"  but  upon  looking  at  it  I  concluded  it  was  not  good 
bait,  for  it  was  doubtful  whether  any  man  in  the  world  who  ever 
owned  a  horse  would  name  him  after  so  contemptible  a  character. 
Hence,  to  make  it  less  conspicuous  it  was  changed  to  read  "dam 
by  Tom  Titmouse,  pacer,"  and  the  bait  was  swallowed  in  a 
twinkling.  The  Kentucky  scheme,  from  its  very  inception,  had 
its  motive  in  securing  a  local  and  personal  advantage  over  the 
breeders  of  every  other  section  of  the  country  and  hence  the 
provisions  of  the  "Pinafore"  standard,  from  which  the  promoters- 
were  only  driven  by  exposure  and  ridicule.  The  piracy  was  con- 
summated as  proved  by  a  hundred  witnesses  that  will  never  die, 
and  of  which  the  "marked  bill"  element,  such  as  "Tom  Titmouse, 
pacer,"  is  an  unmistakable  representative.  With  the  inception, 
and  consummation  both  understood  and  named,  how  could  we  find 
another  name  so  fit  as  "The  Tom  Titmouse  Stud  Book?"  To 
this  might  be  added,  on  an  amended  title-page:  "Edited  by  a 
clerk  employed  by  Lucas  Brodhead  and  Henry  C.  McDowell  of 
Kentucky." 

Some  three  or  four  years  after  the  death  and  burial  of  the  "Tom 
Titmouse"  book  and  when  its  odoriferous  memory  had  become 
less  offensive,  another  effort  was  made  to  get  control  of  the  regis- 
tration business,  by  the  same  parties  in  Kentucky.  Mr.  Brod- 
head did  not  appear  prominently  in  this  move,  but  worked 
through  his  echo,  McDowell.  The  plan  was  to  present  a  monster 
petition  to  the  National  Trotting  Association,  composed  chiefly 
of  track  owners  and  track  followers,  to  establish  a  trotting  regis- 
ter. This  petition  purported  to  be  from  breeders,  but  in  fact  it 
embraced  all  the  "swipes"  and  stable-boys  about  Lexington  and 


534  THE    HORSE    OP    AMERICA. 

Woodburn,  I  was  told,  and  there  were  very  few  actual  breeders 
in  the  list,  and  that  few  were  men  who  were  trying  to  breed  trot- 
ters from  runners.  The  movement  was  inspired  and  engineered 
in  good  degree  from  Woodburn,  and  Brodhead's  friends  were  at 
work  in  all  directions  securing  the  names  of  the  "rag,  tag  and 
bobtail"  whose  names  appeared  on  the  petition,  and  a  very  great 
noise  was  raised  about  what  was  going  to  be  done.  Whether  the 
association  took  any  action  on  the  petition,  or  what  it  was,  I  have 
no  recollection,  but  whatever  the  disposition  made  of  the  peti- 
tion, it  never  was  heard  of  again.  To  the  reader  not  familiar 
with  the  condition  of  things  in  Kentucky  at  that  time,  these 
persistent  and  renewed  attempts  to  get  control  of  the  registra- 
tion of  trotting  horses  can  hardly  be  comprehended.  They  did 
not  grow  out  of  ruffled  tempers  merely,  as  the  result  of  friction, 
but  out  of  strictly  business  considerations.  Kentucky  had  a 
great  variety  of  brood  mares  from  which  they  were  trying  to 
breed  trotters,  and  practically  every  one  of  them  was  tricked  out 
with  more  or  less  running  blood  as  tail-pieces  to  their  pedigrees, 
while  others  were  paraded  with  pedigrees  showing  a  dozen  or 
more  successive  crosses  by  thoroughbred  horses,  and  not  one  of 
them  with  a  name,  a  history  or  a  breeder.  There  were  many 
purchasers  flocking  to  Kentucky  with  more  money  than  knowl- 
edge for  the  purpose  of  buying  a  few  animals  to  serve  as  the 
nucleus  for  a  breeding  stud,  and  it  was  no  uncommon  thing  for 
,such  purchasers  to  estimate  the  value  of  a  pedigree  by  its  length. 
When  the  purchaser  got  home  with  his  stock,  his  next  step  was  to 
send  them  to  me  for  registration,  and  here  came  in  the  "business" 
consideration.  The  pedigree  having  reached  the  office  of  the 
"Register,"  unless  it  were  already  known  to  me,  every  cross  had  to 
be  established  circumstantially  and  specifically  before  it  could  be 
accepted,  and  at  the  precise  point  where  reasonable  information 
failed  the  pedigree  was  cut  off.  The  purchaser  then  goes  back 
upon  the  seller,  and  there  the  trouble  begins.  He  writes  me  an 
indignant  letter.  "You're  interfering  wibh  my  business,  sah; 
that  pedigree  is  just  as  I  got  it  from  Colonel  Jones,  sah;  and  he's 
a  gentleman,  sah."  It  was  very  seldom,  indeed,  that  a  man  of 
this  type  could  be  mollified  by  assuring  him  that  all  pedigrees 
were  judged  by  the  same  rule  and  requirement,  whether  they 
came  from  Maine  or  California  or  Kentucky.  He  generally  re- 
mained an  enemy  to  the  "Register"  because  "it  interfered  with  his 
business."  From  early  in  the  century,  three  or  four  counties 


HOW   THE   TROTTING   HORSE   IS    BRED.  535 

out  of  about  one  hundred  and  twenty  in  Kentucky  bred  running 
horses  and  grades  and  raced  them,  but  no  records  were  kept  of 
their  breeding  and  nobody  knows  with  certainty  to-day  anything 
about  the  more  remote  crosses.  For  a  time  the  union  of  two  or 
three  trotting  horses  upon  the  top  of  a  line  of  nameless  dams  ex- 
tending ten  or  fifteen  generations  was  looked  upon  as  the  perfec- 
tion of  a  trotting  pedigree.  This  notion,  foolish  as  it  was,  gave 
Kentucky  a  great  advantage  over  the  breeders  of  all  other  sec- 
tions of  the  country,  and  every  exposure,  with  the  evidence,  that 
in  nine  cases  out  of  ten  these  lines  of  nameless  dams  were  in 
whole  or  in  part  pure  fictions,  was  cutting  the  ground  from  under 
their  supposed  superiority  in  the  breeding  of  their  trotters. 
Under  the  arguments  and  illustrations  of  the  Monthly,  supported 
by  the  incontrovertible  statistics  of  the  "Year  Book,"  the  Ken- 
tucky cry  for  "more  running  blood  in  the  trotter,"  was  silenced 
.as  the  child  of  ignorance  and  prejudice,  and  instead  of  looking 
for  pedigrees  tracing  back  to  Godolphin  Arabian,  everybody  began 
to  look  for  pedigrees  that  traced  to  individuals  and  families  dis- 
tinguished for  producing  trotters,  no  difference  what  blood  they 
possessed.  Here  the  public  mind  reached  the  truth,  and  in 
grasping  it  the  boasted  predominance  of  Kentucky  was  crushed, 
and  producing  trotting  blood  was  again  placed  on  an  equality  in 
all  parts  of  the  land.  The  loss  of  the  pretensions  of  one  section 
could  not  be  of  any  specific  pecuniary  advantage  to  any  other 
section,  but  the  establishing  of  the  truth  was  of  inestimable  ad- 
vantage to  all.  The  loss  of  mere  "pretentious"  would  not,  in 
ordinary  affairs,  be  considered  a  very  great  loss,  but  in  this  in- 
stance it  was  looked  upon  as  a  grievous  wrong,  because  it  inter- 
fered with  their  "business."  Every  slippery  fellow  who  failed  to 
pass  a  bogus  pedigree  complained  that  it  interfered  with  his 
"business."  Every  gang  of  cheats  that  got  together  and  hired 
the  use  of  a  track  for  a  few  days  for  the  purpose  of  giving  their 
horses  bogus  records,  when  detected,  cried  out  vigorously  that 
this  was  interfering  with  their  "business."  Besides  these,  there 
were  scores,  perhaps  hundreds,  of  others,  ready  for  some  such 
game  to  cheat  the  public,  but  when  they  learned  the  ordeal  was 
severe,  their  courage  failed  and  they  contented  themselves  by 
threatening  the  "Register"  for  interfering  with  their  "business." 
Here  was  an  army  of  jockeys  and  cheats,  and  all  they  needed  to 
make  their  numbers  formidable  was  a  leader  with  courage  and 
money,  and  whose  "business"  was  their  own,  to  seize  regis- 


536  THE   HOKSE   OF   AMERICA. 

tration  and  thus  recoup  the  losses  they  had  sustained  in  their 
"business." 

In  considering  the  conspiracy  that  resulted  in  the  sale  and 
transfer  of  the  Wallace  publications  to  the  American  Trotting  Reg- 
ister Association,  which  means  simply  Lucas  Brodhead,  there  are 
some  antecedent  conditions  connected  with  these  publications 
that  need  a  brief  explanation.  The  first  volume  of  "Wallace's 
American  Trotting  Register"  was  published  in  this  city  in  1871 
and  the  second  in  1874.  An  office  was  opened  in  this  city  in 
1875  and  the  first  number  of  Wallace's  Montlily  was  issued  in 
October  of  that  year.  The  National  Association  of  Trotting 
Horse  Breeders  was  organized  December  20,  1876.  The  attend- 
ance was  large  and  many  of  the  States  were  represented  by  men 
of  influence  and  standing.  Mr.  Charles  Backman  was  elected 
president,  and  L.  D.  Packer  secretary.  From  the  favor  with 
which  the  idea  of  a  national  organization  was  received  and  from 
the  character  of  the  men  participating  in  it,  I  voluntarily  and 
without  judicial  advice  placed  in  the  association  the  authority  to 
appoint  annually  a  Board  of  Censors  to  examine  and  decide  all 
questions  relating  to  disputed  pedigrees  sent  for  registration. 
The  plan  worked  smoothly  and  satisfactorily  for  several  years, 
in  some  of  which  there  was  not  a  single  case  to  be  examined.  My 
publications  were  soon  past  the  critical  point,  and  they  seemed  to 
grow  from  their  inherent  strength,  and  not  from  pushing  or  ad- 
vertising. The  Breeders'  Association  seemed  to  take  the  opposite 
chute,  and  after  three  or  four  years  it  became  merely  a  name. 
At  first  there  was  trouble  in  finding  a  man  to  take  the  presidency, 
but  at  last  a  rich  dry  goods  merchant  was  found  who  was  willing 
to  take  the  presidency,  and  add  five  hundred  dollars  a  year  to- 
some  stake  for  the  honor  conferred;  and  the  secretary,  L.  D. 
Packer,  was  the  mere  satellite  of  the  president,  and  was  willing 
to  give  two  weeks'  work  every  year  for  the  privilege  of  drawing 
a  thousand  dollars  a  year  from  the  treasury.  The  annual  meet- 
ings became  a  mere  formality,  with  an  attendance  of  three  or 
four  and  the  two  officers,  who  seemed  to  re-elect  each  other  year 
after  year,  until  the  association  was  finally  buried  somewhere  out 
in  Michigan,  I  think,  and  the  money  that  had  accumulated  in 
the  treasury  was,  on  his  petition,  donated  to  the  secretary  in 
consideration  of  his  valuable  services  for  so  many  years  in  carrying 
the  association  from  the  cradle  to  the  tomb. 

Owing  to  my  relations  to  the  Breeders'  Association,  I  felt  that 


HOW   THE   TROTTING   HORSE   IS   BRED.  537 

I  was  in  honor  bound  to  maintain  its  good  name  in  the  minds  of 
the  people,  while  every  publication  in  the  whole  country  was 
laughing  at  it,  and  that  this  was  my  duty  as  well  as  my  interest 
until  the  time  came  for  a  final  separation  from  it.  True,  when 
I  made  these  efforts  to  uphold  it  I  had  to  put  my  tongue  in  my 
cheek,  for  I  knew  that  its  management,  like  "the  Old  Man  of 
the  Sea,*'  was  riding  it  to  death.  As  my  business  continued  to 
grow  and  prosper,  I  began  to  consider  the  propriety  of  forming  a 
joint  stock  company  of  breeders,  to  own  and  control  the  property 
absolutely  when  I  was  ready  to  retire.  Greatly  to  my  surprise 
this  proposition  gave  offense  to  the  two  gentlemen  who  managed 
the  association,  for  I  had  not  alluded  to  that  in  any  possible 
manner.  When  explained  to  me  it  became  perfectly  plain  that 
the  offense  was  in  the  fact  that  making  a  legal  corporation  to 
own  and  control  the  property  would  leave  no  "position"  for  the 
president,  no  salary  for  the  secretary  and  no  further  need  for  the 
N.  A.  of  T.  H.  B. 

The  Wallace  Trotting  Eegister  Company,  in  due  time,  was  in- 
corporated under  the  laws  of  the  State  of  ~N"ew  York,  and  com- 
menced business  October  1,  1889.  The  publications  of  the  com- 
pany were  the  "Register,"  the  Monthly  and  the  "Year  Book." 
The  capital  stock  of  the  company  was  fixed  at  one  hundred  thou- 
sand dollars,  and  as  work  came  pouring  in  upon  us  more  rapidly 
than  we  could  handle  it,  labor  became  a  burden  and  I  had  no 
time  to  distribute  this  stock  among  the  breeders  of  every  State, 
as  I  intended.  This  was  the  condition  of  things  in  the  office  in 
the  following  spring  when,  to  my  horror,  I  discovered  I  had  been 
robbed  of  something  over  fifty-four  thousand  dollars  and  the  thief 
escaped  to  Cuba.  The  blow  was  a  stunner,  and  messages  of 
sympathy  came  pouring  in  from  all  quarters,  with  many  tenders 
of  pecuniary  assistance  all  of  which  were  thankfully  acknowledged, 
but  all  tenders  of  assistance  were  declined. 

The  capitalization  at  one  hundred  thousand  dollars,  and  the 
robbery  of  fifty-four  thousand  dollars,  and  the  company  still  not 
crushed,  gave  Mr.  Brodhead  a  new  view  of  the  possibilities  of  the 
future,  and  inspired  him  with  a  new  hope  that  he  might  yet  reach 
the  ambition  of  his  life  and  gain  control  of  the  registration  of  all 
the  trotting  pedigrees  of  the  country.  Without  much  violence 
to  the  processes  of  Brodhead's  mind  we  can  imagine  the  way  in 
which  he  reasoned  out  the  problem.  "This  has  become  a  valua- 
hle  property  and  is  bound  to  be  still  more  valuable,"  he  doubtless 


538  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICAo 

reasoned,  "and  it  is  possible  it  can  be  bought,  but  if  bought  it  must 
be  done  before  that  stock  is  scattered  among  the  breeders  of  the 
different  States.  There  are  Russell  Allen  and  Malcolm  Forbes 
and  a  whole  lot  of  rich  fellows  just  coming  into  the  trotting 
horse  business  and  I  can  show  them  that  this  property  would  be 
a  good  investment.  With  the  money  in  one  hand  and  the  bluff 
of  starting  an  opposition  Register  in  the  other,  it  is  possible  the 
property  might  be  got  for  something  like  its  value."  He  next 
probably  reasoned:  "The  first  thing  to  consider  here,  is  how  to 
make  that  bluff  sufficiently  imposing  and  effective,  in  an  authori- 
tative way;  and  shall  it  be  a  mass  meeting  or  a  delegate  meeting, 
and  where  shall  it  be  held?  I  have  seen  Packer  and  he  evi- 
dently wants  to  know  what  there  is  in  it  for  him  and  Mali,  in  case 
they  agree  to  call  a  National  convention.  They  want  to  perpetu- 
ate their  offices  in  their  present  so-called  National  Association. 
If  it  should  be  a  mass  convention,  and  held  at  Chicago,  I  could 
send  up  a  few  carloads  of  farmers'  sons  from  around  here  and 
every  one  of  them  would  swear  he  was  a  breeder.  If  it  should 
be  a  delegate  convention  from  State  Breeders'  Associations,  there 
are  several  States  that  have  no  such  associations,  but  I  could  get 
a  few  friends  to  organize  for  th'e  purpose  of  sending  delegates. 
The  horse  papers  would  be  a  unit  on  our  side,  for  they  have  been 
'set  on'  so  often  and  so  hard  that  they  would  like  to  see  the  old 
bear  superseded.  Beside  this,  every  one  of  those  papers  has  at 
least  the  one  man  who  is  competent  to  succeed  Wallace,  and 
every  editor  who  has  been  in  the  business  six  months  thinks  he 
is  fully  qualified  for  that  place.  But  the  real  roar  of  the  shout- 
ing would  come  from  the  angry  men  whom  Wallace  has  disap- 
pointed in  refusing  to  accept  their  pedigrees  or  their  perform- 
ances because  they  were  irregular.  These  men  are  very  numer- 
ous and  we  must  have  as  many  of  them  present  as  possible.  I 
think  this  plan  will  work,"  he  doubtless  reasoned  with  himself,, 
"if  we  can  only  keep  Wallace  in  the  dark  till  we  get  things  fixed, 
and  to  throw  him  off  his  guard  I  will  send  him  three  or  four 
pedigrees  to  register." 

Thus  the  plan  of  the  conspiracy,  with  all  the  elements  to  be 
employed,  were  evidently  matured  in  Mr.  Brodhead's  mind. 
There  were  two  points  about  which  he  was  specially  solicitous. 
The  first  was  that  I  should  be  kept  wholly  in  the  dark  as  to  his 
movements  and  purposes,  and  the  second  was  some  apparently 
official  authority  for  calling  a  convention  at  Chicago  that  would 


HOW   THE   TROTTING    HORSE    IS    BRED.  539 

be  of  a  nominally  "national"  character.  On  invitation  Secretary 
Packer  visited  Woodburn,  and  for  a  promised  consideration  it 
was  all  arranged  that  the  President  and  Secretary  of  the  N.  A.  of 
T.  H.  B.  would  call  a  convention.  With  the  initial  step  thus 
safely  provided  for,  Mr.  Brodhead  was  everywhere,  east  and  west, 
north  and  south,  beating  up  recruits.  In  a  short  time,  evidently 
by  preconcerted  arrangement,  there  was  an  unusual  number  of 
horsemen  in  town,  some  of  them  very  rich  men,  while  the  greater 
number  were  blowers  of  the  Dr.  Day  type  with  a  grievance.  The 
horsemen  were  hustled  together  by  Secretary  Packer,  in  what 
was  called  an  impromptu  meeting,  and  there  President  Mali, 
after  some  apparent  hesitation,  fulfilled  his  part  of  the  agree- 
ment and  called  the  convention  at  Chicago,  and  thus  Mr.  Brod- 
head secured  his  share — and  we  will  see  how  the  other  side  fared 
further  on. 

When  the  convention  assembled  at  Chicago  it  was  indeed  a 
motley  mass.  President  Mali  took  his  place  as  president,  and 
called  the  convention  to  order,  and  Secretary  Packer  took  his 
place  as  secretary.  This,  as  I  understand,  was  not  by  the  choice  of 
the  convention,  but  by  virtue  of  their  positions  in  the  N.  A.  of  T. 
H.  B.  It  was  eventually  determined  that  the  meeting  should  be 
composed  of  delegates  from  State  associations,  and  when  the  as- 
sociations were  called,  several  of  them  had  never  been  heard  of 
before  and  never  have  been  heard  of  since.  They  were  bogus 
associations,  and  were  gotten  up  especially  for  the  occasion. 
Some  of  the  delegates  bore  names  that  never  had  been  heard  of 
in  the  office  of  the  "Register,"  and  it  may  be  inferred  they  never 
bred  a  standard  horse.  The  names  of  others,  again,  were  well 
known  in  the  office  from  their  efforts  to  get  spurious  and  un- 
known crosses  accepted.  All  these  men  were  anxious  for  a  new 
management.  One  man  whom  I  had  discharged  from  my  office 
a  few  weeks  before  represented  a  New  England  State.  He  was 
guilty  of  a  flagrant  attempt  at  deception.  He  was  a  fawning 
sycophant,  always  laughing  at  his  own  supposed  wit,  and  he  was 
known  in  the  office  as  "Uriah  Heep."  The  man  who  domi- 
nated the  convention  from  beginning  to  end  had  not  been  ap- 
pointed a  delegate  by  his  own  association.  The  whole  thing,  as 
a  convention,  was  about  as  hollow  a  sham  as  was  ever  enacted  in 
Chicago.  Next  behind  the  gentlemen  who  by  courtesy  may  be 
designated  as  delegates,  sat  the  moneyed  men  who  were  anxiously 
looking  for  a  good  investment  for  some  of  their  loose  funds,  and 


540  THE   HORSE    OF    AMERICA. 

Brodhead  had  told  them  this  property  was  paying  twenty-five 
per  cent,  on  a  capitalization  of  one  hundred  thousand  dollars,  and 
he  thought  it  could  be  made  to  pay  more.  Like  many  other 
fools,  they  thought  it  was  a  machine  that  when  fired  up  in  the 
morning  would  run  itself.  Next  to  the  rich  men  sat  a  good 
sprinkling  of  farmers7  sons,  some  carloads  of  whom  had  been 
brought  from  Kentucky,  and  all  ready  to  swear  they  were  breed- 
ers. As  Brodhead  explained  this  incident  to  a  gentleman  who 
stated  it  to  me:  "If  there  was  any  attempt  to  pack  the  convention 
he  was  ready  to  do  some  packing  himself,  with  these  young  men 
he  had  brought  from  Kentucky." 

On  the  outside  circle  there  was  a  large  number  of  young  men 
and  some  older  ones  watching  the  proceedings  with  great  in- 
tensity. They  were  restless,  and  some  of  them  looked  hungry, 
and  every  one  of  them  was  looking  for  a  place  if  the  purchase 
went  through.  One  had  a  copy  of  the  Bungtown  Bugle  in  his 
pocket  containing  a  report  of  the  racing  at  the  last  county  fair, 
written  by  him,  and  he  thought  that  was  sufficient  evidence  that 
he  was  qualified  to  take  charge  of  the  Monthly.  Another  had 
made,  with  his  own  hands,  as  he  asserted,  a  tabulated  pedigree  on 
a  large  scale  and  shaded  the  letters  beautifully  and  artistically 
with  pokeberry  juice;  and  what  evidence  could  be  more  satisfac- 
tory that  he  was  qualified  to  take  charge  of  the  department  of 
registration?  Every  one  of  them  seemed  to  think  that  there 
would  be  a  good  place  for  him  in  the  new  deal,  and  hence  his 
enthusiasm  at  every  incident  that  seemed  to  point  in  that  direc- 
tion. Thus  the  little  cormorants  as  well  as  the  big  cormorants 
were  all  anxious  for  the  prey. 

While  the  soreheads  were  wrangling  over  how  best  to  get  hold 
of  my  property,  and  what  they  would  do  with  it  when  they  got 
it,  I  had  several  hours  in  the  privacy  of  my  own  apartments  to 
look  over  all  the  conditions  of  the  situation,  and  the  conclusions 
I  then  reached  I  have  never  had  reason  to  change.  It,  there- 
fore, may  be  of  interest  to  all  to  know  just  what  I  thought  at 
that  crucial  period,  and  I  will  give  these  thoughts  as  contem- 
poraneous with  the  event: 

"This  meeting  is  a  miserable  sham,  but  the  action  of  Mali  and 
Packer  has  given  it  a  pseudo-type  of  regularity  as  a  national 
convention  of  horsemen,  and  this  idea  of  'regularity'  will  carry 
weight  with  many  who  know  nothing  of  the  bottom  facts. 

"The  members  of  the  press  will,  substantially,  be  a  unit  against 


HOW   THE   TROTTING    HORSE   IS   BRED.  541 

me,  and  ring  all  the  changes  on  'the  National  convention*  at 
Chicago,  and  labor  to  make  it  appear  as  an  uprising  of  the  horse- 
men of  the  whole  country  against  me. 

"The  meeting  is  packed  by  Brodhead  with  his  own  satellites 
whose  expenses  he  has  paid,  and  embraces  a  good  many  rogues 
who  have  failed  in  passing  upon  me  dishonest  pedigrees  and 
spurious  records.  Besides  these  there  are  several  men  here,  and 
very  active,  whose  names  have  never  been  heard  of  before  in  the 
horse  world. 

"Taking  these  elements  together,  they  are  in  numbers  more 
formidable  than  dangerous,  but  when  led  by  Brodhead,  with 
what  they  consider  a  fair  price  in  one  hand  and  a  club  in  the 
other,  with  the  demand  Hake  the  price  or  we'll  take  the  property,' 
the  occasion  becomes  serious. 

"The  latter  alternative  means  a  battle  that  may  last  ten  years. 
Ten  years  ago  these  same  people  employed  a  man  who  purloined 
my  literary  property  and  it  was  found  in  their  possession.  The 
evidence  of  the  piracy  was  so  clear  that  it  never  was  denied. 

"Have  I  time  enough,  am  I  strong  enough,  am  I  young  enough 
to  enter  upon  this  long  battle?  Ten  years  ago  I  was  robbed  of 
my  property,  but  I  was  then  vigorous  and  strong;  one  year  ago 
another  thief  robbed  me  of  my  money  and  it  was  a  terrific  and 
lasting  strain  upon  my  vitality. 

"The  days  of  my  years  number  nearly  threescore  and  ten,  so 
there  is  no  time  to  enter  upon  the  uncertainties  'of  the  law's 
delays.'  From  overwork  and  the  anxieties  growing  out  of  family 
afflictions  and  the  robbery,  my  health  is  shattered.  It  is  time, 
therefore,  that  I  should  seek  to  rest  rather  than  to  struggle. 

"And  what  about  the  work  to  which  I  have  devoted  the  best, 
years  of  a  long  life?  Will  it  be  attacked?  Certainly  it  will  be 
attacked  for  the  reason  that  it  does  not  suit  "Woodburn.  Will  it 
be  overthrown?  No,  the  laws  of  nature  cannot  be  overthrown. 
The  trotter  can  come  only  from  the  trotter  and  nobody  but  an 
ignoramus  or  a  fool  can  doubt  the  truth  of  this  declaration. 
The  experiences  of  every  year,  of  every  track,  and  in  every  race 
confirm  this  central  truth  and  will  continue  to  do  so  as  long  as 
the  world  stands." 

From  the  above  reasonings  and  conclusions,  when  the  offer  of 
one  hundred  and  thirty  thousand  dollars  was  made,  in  a  business 
form,  it  was  accepted. 

When  the  property  was  transferred  it  was  on  the  individual 


542  THE    HOUSE    OF    AMERICA. 

and  joint  responsibility  of  some  half  a  dozen  rich  men,  and  they 
were  as  gleeful  and  happy  over  their  investment  as  though  they 
had  obtained  a  gold  mine  for  a  song.  But,  while  these  men  were 
rejoicing  over  their  acquisition,  there  were  many  others  cursing 
the  deception  that  had  been  practiced  upon  them  by  promising 
them  places  and  perquisites  and,  in  short,  whatever  they  wanted 
in  order  to  secure  their  adherence  to  the  conspiracy.  Of  all  this 
numerous  class,  Messrs.  Mali  and  Packer  had  so  little  sense  as  to 
make  the  nature  and  terms  of  their  agreement  public,  namely, 
that  they  were  to  be  clothed  with  the  power  to  annually  appoint 
the  Board  of  Censors  for  the  new  organization.  Poor  fools!  they 
didn't  know  Brodhead.  For  a  consideration  of  place  they  had 
betrayed  a  trust  to  him  that  as  honorable  men  they  should  have 
sacredly  guarded,  and  the  more  they  complained  the  more  bit- 
terly they  were  condemned  by  all  right-thinking  men.  Hence, 
after  they  had  served  his  purpose  he  kicked  them  aside  as  he 
would  an  old  shoe,  and  thus  he  punished  the  traitors  with  whom 
he  had  dealt.  When  the  multitude  of  writers,  statisticians,  etc., 
who  had  received  private  assurances  of  "something  equally  as 
good"  in  the  new  deal,  saw  the  fate  of  Mali  and  Packer,  they 
had  sense  enough  to  keep  their  mouths  shut.  A  man  who  knew 
anything  about  the  trotting  families  and  their  lines  of  descent 
was  not  the  kind  of  man  that  Mr.  Brodhead  wanted  to  put  in 
charge  of  registration.  The  only  man  who  could  suit  Mr.  Brod- 
head was  the  man  who  would  implicitly  and  without  doubt  follow 
his  instructions,  right  or  wrong.  When  Mr.  J.  H.  Steiner  was 
appointed  Registrar  it  was  wholly  evident  that  this  was  the  pur- 
pose of  the  proprietor,  for  of  all  the  men  in  my  knowledge,  in 
any  way  connected  with  trotting  horse  interests,  Mr.  Steiner 
seems  to  be  the  most  profoundly  ignorant  of  horse  history  and 
horse  lineage,  and  till  this  day  he  does  not  seem  to  have  learned 
anything  thereof. 

At  this  point  the  public  confidence  received  a  shock  from 
which  it  has  never  recovered,  and  never  will  recover.  From  that 
day  till  the  present  the  estimate  of  value  of  the  publications 
of  the  company,  in  the  minds  of  breeders,  has  been  on  the 
"down  grade,"  and  coupled  with  this  is  the  ever-obtruding  doubt 
as  to  whether  these  publications  are  managed  for  the  advantage 
of  the  general  breeding  public,  or  for  the  little  clique  of  which 
Woodburn  is  the  center.  The  lack  of  knowledge  displayed'  has 
resulted  in  a  profound  disgust.  This  has  been  shown  most  con- 


HOW   THE   TROTTIXG    HORSE    IS    BRED.  543 

clusively  in  the  fate  of  the  poor  old  Monthly.  It  started  out 
under  its  new  owners  to  controvert  breeding  history  and  breeding 
law  in  which  the  public  had  been  thoroughly  and  conscientiously 
indoctrinated.  The  sham  pretense  of  using  the  title  Wallace's 
Monthly  instead  of  Brodhead's  Monthly  was  "too  thin"  to  deceive 
any  one  except  the  most  ignorant.  The  labored  productions  of 
the  weaklings  hired  to  overthrow  the  truth  only  tended  to  deepen 
the  disgust.  The  price  was  lowered  as  an  inducement  to  sup- 
port, but  nobody  wanted  the  miserable  thing  about  his  house, 
arid  thus  it  died  without  a  tear  except  from  the  eyes  of  the  rich 
fools  who  put  their  money  into  it  supposing  it  would  live  and 
prosper  in  the  hands  of  ignorant  and  incompetent  men. 

It  is  natural  for  the  rich  men  who  put  their  money  so  gleefully 
into  this  publishing  enterprise,  at  the  instigation  of  Mr.  Brodhead, 
to  try  to  get  some  of  it  back  before  the  final  smash,  which  is  evi- 
dently not  far  removed,  and  hence  the  ignorant  and  blundering 
emasculation  of  the  Year  Book,  in  order  to  reduce  its  cost. 
"The  Great  Table,"  as  it  was  called  for  years,  embraces  all 
others,  and  all  others  are  merely  subsidiary  to  that.  This  table 
should  be  restored  in  its  entirety,  for  it  is  worth  the  whole  of 
them  and  double  as  many  more.  With  every  other  table  thrown 
out  and  this  one  restored,  complete,  the  breeders  would  be  con- 
tent. The  Year  Book — the  great  instructor  of  the  past — I  have 
just  learned  is  no  longer  published  for  the  breeders  or  for  the 
press,  but  for  the  tracks.  The  operation  is  explained  as  fol- 
lows: Every  year  the  secretaries  of  the  National  and  the  Ameri- 
can Trotting  Associations  send  out  by  express  a  lot  of  blank 
books,  blanks,  etc.,  to  each  track  in  good  standing  and  in  this 
outfit  for  the  year  is  a  copy  of  the  Year  Book,  which  is  charged 
at  the  long  price.  The  tables  of  fastest  records,  I  am  told,  are 
quite  carefully  made  in  the  offices  of  these  associations  them- 
selves, and  the  book  is  thus  made  a  convenience  for  the  tracks. 
Thus,  by  this  system  of  forced  loans  on  the  tracks,  the  Year 
Book  is  kept  alive.  This  method  of  financing  the  company  will 
not  last  long. 

A  different  method  has  been  adopted  in  order  to  secure  funds 
from  registration.  Money  for  registration  must  come  from  the 
breeders  themselves  directly,  and  there  is  no  way  of  forcing  them 
to  put  up  through  the  manipulation  of  intermediary  officials. 
Hence  the  plan  has  been  tried  of  scaring  them  into  it,  but  with 
what  success  I  am  not  informed.  At  the  annual  meeting  in 


544  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

April,  1895,  I  think  it  was,  a  committee  was  appointed,  consist- 
ing of  Messrs.  Brodhead  and  Boyle,  if  I  remember,  to  consider 
and  report  to  the  next  meeting  amendments  to  the  standard  ad- 
vancing the  requirements  for  registration,  and  everybody  was 
advised  to  hurry  in  their  pedigrees  or  they  might  be  excluded. 
At  the  meeting  in  1896  the  committee  did  not  report,  but  Mr, 
Brodhead  reported  in  a  series  of  resolutions,  in  which  the  num- 
ber of  standard  dams  was  advanced,  which  suited  Woodburn 
exactly,  but  there  was  no  advance  in  the  time  to  be  made,  and 
the  tin-cup  record  against  time  was  carefully  protected.  The 
resolutions  were  adopted  unanimously,  and  went  before  the 
breeding  public  as  the  new  advanced  standard  that  would  be  de- 
cided at  the  next  annual  meeting.  From  time  to  time  the  breed- 
ers were  duly  informed  of  the  proposed  advance  and  cautioned 
many  times  to  get  in  while  they  could.  The  annual  meeting  in 
April,  1897,  came,  and  instead  of  a  rush  of  breeders  interested  one 
way  or  another  in  the  proposed  advance,  the  same  stereotyped 
half  a  dozen  men  were  there  who  had  been  manipulating  the 
scare  for  two  years,  and  not  one  of  them,  even  Brodhead  himself, 
voted  for  the  advance.  This  is  no  advance  at  all,  in  a  practical 
sense,  and  would  accomplish  nothing,  and  would  do  no  good  to 
anybody  except  Woodburn  or  some  other  establishment  that  like 
her  has  been  breeding  trotters  for  forty  years.  It  was  merely  in- 
tended for  a  scare,  and  it  failed  under  such  circumstances  as  to 
fully  disclose  the  object  in  placing  it  before  the  breeders.  The 
scare  is  all  out  of  this  kind  of  humbug  and  deception,  and  now 
what?  When  the  standard  was  adopted  on  the  basis  of  2:30  that 
rate  of  speed  was  sixteen  seconds  behind  the  fastest  record  then 
made.  To-day  if  the  standard  were  placed  at  2:20  it  would  be 
about  sixteen  seconds  slower  than  the  fastest  time  now  on  record. 
But  this  real  advance,  which  is  imperatively  demanded  by  all  the 
considerations  of  philosophy  and  progress,  will  never  be  made  so 
long  as  the  standard  is  under  the  control  of  Woodburn.  The 
reason  for  this  is  made  obvious  by  reference  to  page  504,  etc. 
Mr.  Brodhead's  ambition  has  been  fully  gratified,  he  is  in  full  and 
absolute  control  of  the  registration  of  the  country,  he  has  com- 
pletely demonstrated,  his  incompetency  for  such  a  position,  and 
he  has  the  satisfaction  of  knowing,  if  it  be  a  satisfaction,  that  no 
sensible  business  man  on  the  face  of  the  globe  would  be  willing 
to  pay  ten  per  cent,  of  the  cost  for  the  property  he  now  controls. 


HOW   THE   TROTTIKG   HORSE   IS   BRED.  545 

And  who  will  say  this  is  not  a  righteous  retribution  for  the  disrep- 
utable means  employed,  first  and  last,  to  obtain  this  control? 

My  life-work  in  building  up  a  breed  of  trotting  horses  and 
thereby  adding  many  millions  to  the  value  of  the  horse  stock  of 
the  country  had  been  more  effective  than  I  had  even  hoped  for. 
I  knew  that  I  had  laid  the  foundation  on  the  bed-rock  of  truth, 
and  I  knew  that  the  superstructure  had  been  honestly  erected, 
but  I  did  not  know  what  a  deep  root  my  teachings  had  taken  in 
the  minds  of  all  intelligent  and  thinking  men.  In  transferring 
the  property  the  chief  source  of  my  unhappiness  was  in  the 
thought  that  heaven  an$  earth  would  be  moved  to  destroy  what 
I  had  done  and  overthrow  what  I  had  taught.  But  I  had 
builded  wiser  and  stronger  than  I  knew,  and  when  the  "feather- 
weights" were  hired  to  pull  the  house  down  and  tear  up  the  very 
roots  of  the  seed  I  had  planted,  the  people  would  not  listen  to 
them  and  nobody  would  read  their  vapid  utterances.  And  thus 
the  effort  ended  in  the  death  of  the  Monthly.  The  harvest  of 
thought  was  much  nearer  the  reaping  time  when  the  transfer  was 
made  than  I  had  supposed,  and  since  then  it  has  been  ripening 
and  ripening,  and  to-day  if  any  man  were  heard  advocating  more 
running  blood  in  the  trotter,  he  would  with  very  great  unanimity 
be  pronounced  either  an  ignoramus  or  a  fool,  on  that  question  at 
least. 

But,  much  as  I  disliked  to  surrender  my  life-work  to  a  man 
whose  moral  fiber  I  had  tested  and  found  brittle,  the  transfer 
was  really  "a  blessing  in  disguise."  It  gave  me  rest,  it  gave  me 
health,  and  it  gave  me  leisure  to  prosecute  the  study  of  the  horse 
of  history  in  fields  hitherto  untrodden.  The  years  thus  employed 
in  digging  after  the  very  roots  of  history  in  the  libraries,  at  home 
and  abroad,  have  glided  by,  affording  a  continuous  enjoyment  in 
the  discovery  of  many  things  that  are  very  old  and  yet  entirely 
new  to  this  generation.  Very  often,  when  the  work  went  slowly, 
I  thought  I  could  again  hear  the  quiet,  sympathetic  voice  of  a 
Pennsylvania  Friend  gently  prompting  me  with  the  remark, 
"Thee  should  remember  that  thee  is  no  longer  a  young  man." 
And  now  that  my  long-promised  and  pleasant  undertaking  is 
completed,  it  is  my  very  earnest  wish  that  the  thousand  friends 
who  have  been  waiting  for  it  may  enjoy  the  pleasant  surprises  it 
will  furnish  them  as  much  as  I  have  enjoyed  their  exhumation 
xfrom  the  archives  of  long-buried  centuries. 


APPENDIX 
HISTORY  OF  THE  WALLACE  PUBLICATIONS. 

BY  A   FRIEND   OF  THE  AUTHOR. 

Mr.  Wallace's  early  life  and  education — Removal  to  Iowa,  1845 — Secretary 
Iowa  State  Board  of  Agriculture — Begins  work,  1856,  on  "  Wallace's 
American  Stud  Book,"  published  1867 — Method  of  gathering  pedigrees — 
Trotting  Supplement — Abandons  Stud  Book,  1870,  and  devotes  exclusive 
attention  to  trotting  literature — "American  Trotting  Register,"  Vol.  I., 
published  in  1871— Vol.  II.  follows  in  1874— The  valuable  essay  on  breed- 
ing the  forerunner  of  present  ideas — Standard  adopted  1879 — Its  history — 
Battles  for  control  of  the  "  Register" —  Wallace's  Montlily  founded  1875 — 
Its  character,  purposes,  history,  writers,  and  artists — "  Wallace's  Year 
Book  "  founded  1&85— Great  popularity  and  value — Transfer  of  the  Wal- 
lace publications,  and  their  degeneration. 

THE  history  of  the  series  of  works  known  as  the  Wallace  publications, 
even  in  the  brief  form  here  contemplated,  involves  in  a  large  degree  the 
biography  of  Mr.  Wallace.  It  is  indeed  more  than  the  sketch  of  a  long 
and  iudefatigably  industrious  life-work.  It  involves  as  well,  in  the  forty 
years  of  creative  labor,  the  development  of  a  great  productive  industry, 
and  of  a  distinct  branch  of  literature.  Mr.  Wallace's  labors  in  the  field 
of  gathering  and  systematizing  American  horse  history  began  at  a  day 
when  there  was  no  breed  of  trotters,  or  no  trotting  literature.  When  he 
laid  aside  active  work  there  were  both,  well  established  and  clearly  defined 
factors  in  the  nation's  progress,  and  in  all  the  years  from  the  commence- 
ment he  was  the  central  figure  in  the  work  of  establishing  a  breed  of  trot- 
ters, and  incomparably  the  clearest  and  strongest  force  in  the  direction 
and  upbuilding  of  a  trotting  literature.  That  is  the  simple  truth  of  his- 
tory, which  the  verdict  of  time  will  render  it  puerile  to  deny. 

JOHN  H.  WALLACE  was  born  August  16,  1822,  and  reared  on  a  farm 
in  Allegheny  County,  Pennsylvania.  As  a  boy  he  evinced  no  par- 
ticular liking  for  farm  work,  but  had  a  great  fondness  for  reading.  He 
was  educated  chiefly  at  the  Frankfort  Springs  Academy,  where  he  was 
prepared  to  enter  the  junior  class  at  college.  There  occurred  a  little 
incident  at  this  time  that  illustrates  how  seemingly  slight  a  thing  may 
change  the  current  of  a  life.  The  then  member  of  Congress  for  that  dis- 
trict, Mr.  Dickey,  a  scholarly  man,  advised  Professor  Nicholson,  of  the 
Academy,  that  if  he  had  a  young  man  in  his  institution  whom  he  could 
recommend,  he  (Mr.  Dickey)  would  appoint  him  a  cadet  to  West  Point. 
Mr.  Wallace  was  selected,  provided  his  father's  consent  was  forthcoming. 
When  Mr.  Wallace,  Sr.,  was  approached  on  the  subject  his  reply  was, 


548  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

"  John,  I  think  there  is  some  better  employment  in  the  world  for  you  than 
studying  the  most  approved  methods  of  killing  men  " — and  that  ended  the 
West  Point  incident.  Young  Mr.  Wallace,  about  this  time,  became 
alarmed,  however,  at  his  then  persistently  delicate  health,  and  decided  to 
seek  an  outdoor  life  rather  than  one  of  study.  In  1845  he  married  Miss 
Ellen  Ewing  (who  died  in  1891),  of  Fayette  County,  Pennsylvania,  and 
settled  on  a  farm  at  Muscatine,  Iowa.  Iowa  was  then  a  new  country,  and 
Mr.  Wallace  did  much  in  the  way  of  organizing  the  industrial  and  educa- 
tional interests  of  the  State.  There,  as  related  below,  he  began  work  in 
the  line  in  which  he  became  famous.  With  an  invalid  wife  he  returned  to 
Allegheny  in  1872;  and  in  1875  in  company  with  the  late  Benjamin  Singerly, 
of  Pittsburg,  started  Wallace's  Monthly  at  New  York,  which  has  been  his 
home  ever  since.  Mr.  Wallace  in  1893  married  Miss  Ellen  Wallace  Veech, 
a  niece  of  the  first  Mrs.  Wallace  ;  and  since  his  retirement  from  active  busi- 
ness he  has  spent  his  time,  at  home  and  abroad,  chiefly  in  prosecuting 
investigations  into  the  horse  history  of  the  remote  periods,  the  results  of 
which  are  seen  in  this,  his  crowning  life-work. 

We  will  endeavor  here  to  sketch,  in  the  abstract,  the  history  of  Mr. 
Wallace's  publications  to  as  great  a  degree  as  possible  separately,  though 
they  cannot  be  entirely  separated.  The  "  Trotting  Register"  was  an  out- 
growth of  the  "Stud  Book,"  and  Wallace's  Monthly  and  the  "Year  Book" 
outgrowths  of  the  "Register,"  and  both  auxiliary  thereto.  The  career 
and  usefulness  of  all  were  intertwined,  yet  each  had  its  own  peculiar  mis- 
sion, and  to  that  extent  their  histories  will  be  kept  distinct. 

"  WALLACE'S  AMERICAN  STUD  BOOK." 

During  the  early  "  fifties  "  Mr.  Wallace,  then  in  the  prime  of  early  man- 
hood, was  Secretary  of  the  Iowa  State  Board  of  Agriculture,  and  as  such  had 
much  to  do  with  the  management  of  State  fairs.  He  was  thus  frequently 
called  upon  for  information  about  the  pedigrees  of  animals,  and  the  need 
of  an  authority  on  horse  pedigrees  was  pointedly  and  constantly  forced 
upon  his  attention.  If  the  pedigree  of  a  cow  was  asked  for  he  had  only 
to  turn  to  the  "American  Herd  Book"  to  find  it,  but  when  the  breeding 
of  a  horse  was  wanted  there  was  no  authority  to  which  to  turn.  Mr.  Wal- 
lace had  been  dabbling  more  or  less  in  such  horse  literature  as  there  was 
at  that  day,  and  in  1856  began  collecting  information  with  the  ultimate 
purpose  of  publishing  a  stud  book  of  thoroughbred  horses — for  the  thor- 
oughbred was  then  here,  as  in  England,  supreme  as  the  only  horse  of 
literature.  He  already  possessed  certain  of  the  publications  that  were  the 
best  horse  authorities  of  the  day— a  file  of  the  /Spirit  of  the  Times,  Skin- 
ner's American  Turf  Register  and  /Sporting  Magazine,  and  a  number 
of  volumes  of  the  "English  Stud  Book,"  and  English  Sporting  Magazine. 
Added  to  these,  later,  were  other  sources  of  information  and  misinformation 
most  notable  in  this  latter  class  being  the  alleged  "  Stud  Book  "  published 
by  Patrick Nesbitt Edgar,  of  North  Carolina,  in  1833— an  utterly  unreliable 


APPENDIX.  549 

work,  but  the  only  American  stud  book  in  existence  prior  to  Wallace's. 
From  these,  and  every  other  available  source,  Mr.  Wallace  began  to  glean 
and  systematically  compile  the  pedigrees  of  thoroughbred  and  so-called 
thoroughbred  horses.  Of  these  sources  by  far  the  most  valuable  was 
Skinner's  periodical,  begun  in  Baltimore  in  1829.  Novice  as  he  was  at 
the  time,  Edgar's  work  was  regarded  with  more  than  suspicion  by  Mr. 
Wallace,  and,  as  a  matter  of  caution  as  well  as  of  honesty,  whenever  he 
borrowed  pedigrees  from  Edgar  they  were  so  credited. 

Modern  methods  of  investigating  pedigrees  were  not  dreamed  of  by  our 
compiler  then.  His  principal  aim  seems  to  have  been  to  get  as  large  a 
collection  as  possible,  and  whatever  was  found  in  print,  whether  news- 
paper, book,  or  hand-bill,  was  taken  for  granted;  and  pedigrees  gathered 
from  private  sources  were,  like  the  others,  submitted  to  little  scrutiny. 
Neither  men's  motives  nor  their  knowledge  of  what  they  represented  to 
know  were  questioned,  and  in  this  way,  after  years  of  labor,  a  great  mass 
of  pedigrees  was  gathered,  written  in  new  form  and  order,  and  the  thor- 
oughbred stallions  numbered — which  was  the  first  instance  of  numbering 
horses  in  registration.  While  compiling  the  thoroughbred  pedigrees,  Mr. 
Wallace  also  incidentally  seized  upon  such  information  as  he  found  about 
trotting  pedigrees  and  records,  and  these  he  arranged  as  an  appendix 
to  his  work.  Finally,  in  1867,  "Wallace's  American  Stud  Book,"  a 
great,  handsome  volume  of  1,017  pages,  bound  pretentiously  in  green  and 
gold,  was  published  in  New  York. 

The  trotting  supplement  embraced  about  100  pages,  and  that  the  editor 
was  pretty  well  satisfied  with  it  is  shown  by  a  sentence  in  the  preface: 
"It  is  believed  that  this  compilation  of  trotting  horses,  embracing  over 
700  animals,  is  very  nearly  perfect,  but  it  is  not  claimed  to  be  entirely  so." 
Of  course,  from  the  method  of  its  compilation  it  was  decidedly  imper- 
fect, but  it  was  the  best  and  only  compilation  of  trotting  pedigrees  up  to 
that  time. 

Meanwhile  Mr.  Wallace  was  pushing  forward  the  compilation  of  the  sec- 
ond volume  of  the  "  Stud  Book,"  and  in  this  traveled  much,  making  per- 
sonal investigations.  In  1870  this  was  completed,  all  the  ground  up  to 
that  year  having  been  gone  over,  but  in  the  course  of  the  work  "  a  great 
light"  began  to  dawn  upon  the  compiler.  He  found  that  he  had  been 
proceeding  on  a  wrong  plan  entirely.  Experience  in  compiling  and  inves- 
tigating taught  him  that  a  pedigree  may  be  printed  in  a  newspaper,  or 
even  in  a  book,  and  still  not  be  true.  He  discovered  that  the  sources  from 
which  he  had  drawn  were  largely  unreliable,  that  hundreds  of  pedigrees, 
through  ignorance  or  dishonesty,  or  both,  were  fabrications  and  frauds, 
especially  in  their  extensions  in  the  maternal  lines,  and  with  the  realiza- 
tion in  full  force  of  this  knowledge  came  the  determination,  even  though 
the  last  page  of  the  manuscript  for  the  second  volume  of  the  "Stud 
Book  "  was  complete,  that  it  should  never  see  the  light. 

At  the  same  time  Mr.  Wallace  had  discovered  that  the  trotting  sup- 


550  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

plement  was  the  part  of  his  "Stud  Book"  most  used  and  appreciated. 
He  saw  that  the  trotter  was  coming  to  be  the  horse  of  the  American 
people,  and  that  there  was  a  great  and  new  field  opening  in  which  a  lit- 
erature had  yet  to  be  formed.  His  experience  with  the  "  Stud  Book  "  gave 
him  the  training  necessary  for  the  work  before  him,  and  thus  equipped, 
with  little  capital  outside  of  his  newly  acquired  knowledge,  and  marvel- 
ous natural  industry  and  perseverance,  with  an  unusual  capacity  for 
hard  work,  he  turned  in  1870  to  the  work  before  him— the  literature  of  the 
trotter. 

"  WALLACE'S  AMERICAN  TROTTING  REGISTER." 

He  had  as  a  nucleus  the  supplement  to  Volume  I.  of  the  "  Stud  Book," 
added  to  which  was  the  work  done  and  knowledge  gained  in  compiling 
the  second  volume,  together  with  an  increasing  library  and  written  data. 
Thus  in  incidentally  adding  a  few  pages  of  trotting  pedigrees  to  his  "  Stud 
Book,"  Mr.  Wallace  had  builded  better  than  he  knew,  but  he  even  now 
had  little  conception  of  the  extent  and  richness  of  his  new  field  of  explora- 
tion. He  traveled  all  over  the  country,  levying  upon  every  source  of  in- 
formation for  his  "Trotting  Register;"  but,  taught  in  the  dear  school  of 
experience,  depended  chiefly  upon  personal  investigation,  taking  monthly 
and  yearly  less  and  less  for  granted.  He  gradually  became  more  trained 
in  meeting  the  natural  human  fondness  for  embellishing,  extending  and 
completing  pedigrees  without  reference  to  fact  or  evidence,  and  the 
equally  common  predilection  for  stating  as  known  facts  those  things  con- 
cerning pedigrees  that  were  only  of  common  report.  This  work  was 
excellent  training  for  the  more  extended  duties  of  the  future,  and  it  gave 
Mr.  Wallace  an  insight  into  methods  of  the  olden  time,  and  a  knowledge 
of  men  and  horses  that  later  made  him,  backed  by  uncompromising 
honesty,  absolute  fearlessness,  and  a  quite  unusual  disregard  for  "  policy," 
a  "terror  to  evil-doers"  in  the  realm  of  manufacturing  in  whole  or  in 
part  fraudulent  pedigrees. 

Still  the  knowledge,  the  caution,  the  system  that  made  it  almost  im- 
possible in  the  last  years  of  Mr.  Wallace's  administration  to  impose  a  fraud 
upon  the  *  'Register"  were  of  slow,  gradual,  but  constant  growth.  The  work 
improved  with  every  volume,  with  every  year  of  experience,  and  the  evi- 
dence that  would  be  accepted  in  the  compilation  of  the  early  volumes 
would  not  suffice  later.  Mr.  Wallace  had  also  the  quality  of  just  as  re- 
morselessly overthrowing  his  own  errors  as  those  of  others,  and  thus  a 
system  of  correction  was  continually  going  along,  in  which  work  Wallace's- 
Monthly,  founded  in  1875,  was  a  particularly  effective  agency. 

The  first  volume  of  the  "  Trotting  Register"  was  published  in  1871,  and 
was  a  neat  book  of  504  pages.  It  contained,  besides  the  pedigrees  gathered, 
tables  of  all  trotting  and  pacing  performances  up  to  the  close  of  1870,  and 
this  was  the  first  time  in  which  the  records  of  the  trotting  turf  were 


APPENDIX.  551 

collected  and  published.  This  part  of  the  work  entailed  a  vast  amount  of 
research,  including  a  thorough  review  of  all  sporting  papers,  annuals  and 
other  sources  where  contemporaneous  record  of  racing  would  be  liable  to 
be  made,  but  it  was  a  very  valuable  feature;  and,  besides  serving  as  a 
basis  for  Mr.  Wallace's  future  compilations,  was  unscrupulously  seized  upon 
by  imitators  who,  from  time  to  time,  sought  to  publish  '-record  books." 

There  was  also  an  introduction  to  the  volume  entitled,  "An  Essay  on 
the  True  Origin  of  the  American  Trotter,"  which  showed  a  glimmering  of 
understanding  of  the  truths  of  history  and  of  breeding  as  now  understood 
by  students  well  grounded  in  the  subject.  In  the  second  volume,  how- 
ever, was  an  essay  that  marks  an  epoch  in  the  literature  of  breeding. 
Written  less  than  three  years  after  the  introduction  to  Volume  I.,  it  be- 
trays the  fact  that  in  the  intervening  years  the  author  had  risen  suddenly 
and  broadened  infinitely  in  his  study  of  the  science  of  breeding,  and  his 
understanding  of  the  application  thereto  of  the  facts  of  trotting  history. 
It  advanced  then  entirely  new  views,  and  it  was  the  first  article  published, 
as  far  as  the  writer  is  aware,  that  rose  to  an  appreciation  of  the  supremacy 
of  biological  laws  in  horse  breeding,  and  suggested  such  a  thing  as 
psychical  heredity  in  the  transmission  of  habits  of  action.  It  originated 
the  term  "  trotting  instinct,"  so  generally  used  thereafter,  began  the  dis- 
cussion of  the  problem  of  the  increasing  number  of  fast  trotters  from 
pacing  ancestors,  and  wound  up  with  ten  sound  propositions  or  conclusions 
based  throughout  on  the  law  that  like  begets  like.  It  opened  up  new  and 
endless  lines  of  investigation  and  thought,  and  at  once  elevated  the  dis- 
cussion to  a  scientific  plane.  This  article,  written  by  Mr.  Wallace  origi- 
nally for  the  Spirit  of  the  Times,  marked  the  advent  of  the  school  of 
thought  on  breeding  now  almost  universal. 

The  second  volume  of  the  "Register"  was  published  in  1874,  and  the  third 
in  1879.  The  first  three  volumes  of  the  "Register"  contained  about  10,000 
pedigrees,  and  the  statistical  tables  in  the  second  and  third  volumes  were 
greatly  improved  and  amplified  over  those  in  the  first.  Volume  II.  gave 
a  table  of  sires  of  2:30  horses,  with  the  number  to  the  credit  of  each  sire, 
and  the  number  of  heats  to  the  credit  of  each  performer — a  sort  of  vague 
foreshadowing  of  the  famous  "  Great  Table  of  Trotters  under  their  Sires," 
later  to  be  conceived  and  developed  by  Mr.  Wallace,  and  destined  to  be- 
come the  most  valuable  single  trotting  compilation  yet  designed,  and  the 
one  now  universally  used,  adopted  and  imitated.  This  volume  also  gave 
a  table  of  2:25  trotters  to  the  close  of  1873,  arranged  in  the  order  of  their 
speed.  The  first  table  of  trotters  under  their  sires  was  published  in 
Wallace's  Monthly,  covering  the  statistics  to  the  end  of  1877. 

The  third  volume  was  much  larger  than  its  predecessors.  The  industry 
of  breeding  trotting  and  pacing  horses  was,  under  the  stimulus  of  the 
"  Register "  and  Wallace's  Monthly,  and  other  agencies  with  which  Mr. 
Wallace  was  identified,  and  of  a  general  era  of  prosperity  then  dawning, 
advancing  and  extending  now  at  rapid  strides,  and  about  this  time  certain 


552  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

events  of  almost  inestimable  influence  on  the  future  of  the  business 
transpired. 

In  the  autumn  of  1876  there  was  formed  at  New  York  the  National 
Association  of  Trotting  Horse  Breeders,  an  organization  in  which  Mr. 
Wallace's  influence  predominated  from  its  inception  until  a  short  time 
before  its  dissolution,  for  lack  of  an  excuse  for  existence.  This  organiza- 
tion was  broadly  representative  of  the  best  elements  in  the  breeding  busi- 
ness in  its  virile  and  useful  days,  and  accepted  a  sort  of  advisory  and 
supervisory  control  over  the  "Trotting  Register;"  and  Volume  III.  and  sub- 
sequent volumes  were  compiled  under  its  authority.  Questions  of  dis- 
puted pedigrees  and  other  such  issues  affecting  breeding  and  the  record 
of  pedigrees  were  decided  by  a  Board  of  Censors  appointed  by  this  associa- 
tion; and,  aside  from  its  usefulness  in  connection  with  the  "  Trotting 
Register,"  it  contributed  largely  to  the  advancement  and  encouragement  of 
breeding  by  inaugurating  colt  stakes,  and  other  stakes  designed  more 
especially  to  attract  the  breeder  than  the  professional  campaigner. 

Before  the  third  volume  was  through  the  press  the  need  of  some  meas- 
ure for  restricting  registration  became  apparent  to  Mr.  Wallace.  The  eco- 
nomics of  the  "Register"  demanded  it,  but  beyond  this  the  need  of  system- 
atizing and  establishing  a  specific  breed  called  for  some  definition  as  to 
what  rightfully  belonged  to  that  breed.  Up  to  this  time  the  only  rule  was 
the  indefinite  provision  that  "anything  well  related  to  trotting  blood" 
might  be  acceptable  as  eligible  by  the  compiler  of  the  "Register."  The 
problem  that  confronted  those  who  took  a  broad  and  comprehensive  view 
was  to  educate  public  opinion  up  to  that  point  where  the  possibility  of 
establishing  a  breed  of  trotters  would  be  appreciated.  As  early  as  April, 
1878,  Wallace's  Monthly  strongly  urged  the  necessity  of  a  standard,  and 
this  was  the  first  suggestion  of  one  that  had  been  made.  At  the  Novem- 
ber meeting  of  the  National  Association  of  Trotting  Horse  Breeders  that 
year  the  Board  of  Censors  in  their  report  presented  a  letter  from  Mr. 
Wallace  advising  the  adoption  of  a  standard,  a  recommendation  which  the 
Board  indorsed.  Meanwhile  the  matter  was  being  agitated  and  discussed 
in  Wallace's  Monthly,  and  affairs  were  gradually  shaping  for  action.  In 
the  March,  1879,  number  of  the  Monthly  a  standard  formulated  by  certain 
Kentucky  breeders  and  forwarded  by  Major  H.  C.  McDowell  was  printed 
and  commented  upon.  It  was  fair  on  its  face,  but  under  discussion  its 
weak  points  were  made  clear.  For  instance,  its  fourth  rule  made  stand- 
ard "Any  mare  the  dam  of  any  mare  or  stallion  that  has  produced  or 
sired  a  horse,  mare,  or  gelding  with  a  record  of  2:30."  It  was  pointed 
out  that  under  this  rule  the  celebrated  English  thoroughbred  mare 
Queen  Mary  would  become  a  standard  trotter,  for  her  son,  the  race  horse 
Bonnie  Scotland,  had  sired  the  trotter  Scotland.  As  other  provisions 
made  the  sisters  and  brothers  of  standard  animals  standard,  the  defects  of 
the  Kentucky  standard  were  made  patent,  and  the  Breeders'  Association 
failed  to  approve  it.  Instead,  at  a  meeting  at  the  Everett  House,  New 


APPENDIX.  553 

York,  November  19,  1879,  the  standard  as  printed  on  pages  519-20,  in  the 
framing  of  which  Mr.  Wallace  and  General  B.  F.  Tracy  did  the  active 
work,  was  unanimously  adopted. 

Under  this  standard  the  work  of  compiling  Volume  IV.,  which  involved 
bringing  forward  animals  registered  in  preceding  volumes,  that  met  its 
requirements,  and  numbering  stallions,  was  carried  on. 

Meanwhile,  some  Kentucky  gentlemen  failed  to  acquiesce  in  the  stand- 
ard decision,  and  had,  or  believed  they  had,  other  grievances  against  the 
compiler  of  the  *  'Register. "  They  proceeded  to  plan  to  control  the  * '  Regis- 
ter." but  as  in  the  last  chapter  of  this  work  Mr.  Wallace  gives  full  details 
of  this  and  subsequent  battles  for  the  control  of  registration,  this  history 
need  not  be  here  repeated. 

In  the  meantime  the  breeding  interest  was  enjoying  remarkable  pros- 
perity, and  this  was  reflected  upon  and  through  the  ''Trotting  Register" 
and  Wallace's  Monthly.  In  1882  Volume  IV.  was  published,  Volume  V. 
in  1886,  and  Volume  VI.  in  1887,  these  containing  about  6,000  pedigrees 
each.  Volume  VII.  appeared  in  1888,  Volume  VIII.  in  1890,  and 
Volume  IX.,  the  last  published  by  Mr.  Wallace,  appeared  in  1891. 

While  an  adequate  discussion  of  the  standard  is  neither  necessary  or 
possible  in  this  article,  it  was  so  obviously  part  and  parcel  of  the  "Trot- 
ting Register"  that  its  history  must  be  briefly  outlined.  The  standard 
formulated  in  1879  served  its  purpose  well,  but  it  was  but  an  initial  step, 
and  it  was  fully  recognized  by  Mr.  Wallace  at  the  time  that  it  would  have 
to  be  revised  and  strengthened  from  time  to  time  so  as  to  keep  pace  with 
the  progress  of  the  breeders.  If  the  standard  to-day  is  held  in  slight 
esteem,  or  even  in  contempt,  it  is  clearly  because  it  has  been  allowed  to 
lag  far  behind  the  progress  of  the  breed. 

Evils  grew  out  of  the  standard,  even  in  its  early  years,  simply  through  a 
quite  general  misunderstanding  of  its  purposes  and  its  full  meaning.  Stand- 
ard rank  became  instantly  so  popular  and  so  sought  after  that  thousands  of 
breeders  aimed  solely  to  breed  into  the  standard,  without  much  regard  for 
other  necessary  qualifications.  They  seemed  to  forget  that  it  was  merely  a 
definition  of  the  blood  that  was  eligible  to  the  "Register,"  and  not, 
nor  ever  intended,  to  be  taken  as  a  general  measuring  stick  of  value.  Soon 
after  its  adoption  an  era  of  great  prosperity  came  in  trotting  affairs,  with 
recklessly  high  prices  for  standard  animals.  With  an  apparently  insatiable 
market  there  came  an  abnormal  expansion  of  the  industry.  Thousands  of 
men  began  breeding  without  knowing  anything,  either  practically  or 
theoretically,  about  the  industry,  except  how  to  get  into  the  standard. 
Hence  the  overproduction  of  not  only  standard  trotting  horses,  but  all 
kinds  of  trotting  horses  of  inferior  breeding  and  little  excellence,  and  the 
subsequent  break  in  prices,  for  all  of  which  the  standard  has  been  by 
inconsiderate  persons  blamed. 

Not  long  after  its  adoption  Mr.  Wallace  saw  these  dangerous  tendencies, 
and  in  the  Monthly  warned  the  breeders  against  them,  and  early  began 


554  THE   HORSE    OF   AMERICA. 

agitating  for  a  revision  of  the  rules.  But  nothing  could  stem  that  rising 
tide,  and  at  first  the  opposition  to  any  change  in  the  rules  was  vehement 
and  general.  The  obviously  easy  gateway  into  the  standard  was  through 
rule  seven,  and  this  became  the  storm  center  of  the  discussion.  Mr.  Wal- 
lace led  in  the  call  for  the  abolition  of  ;  his  rule,  and  did  it  so  persistently 
and  well  that  gradually  the  leading  breeders  and  thinkers  were  won  over, 
but  the  outcry  against  a  change  was  so  earnest  and  so  general  among  the 
smaller  breeders  that  the  National  Association  hesitated  long.  Though  a 
Committee  on  Revision  was  appointed  as  early  as  December,  1885,  it  was 
not  until  December  14,  1887,  that  a  revision  was  finally  effected,  the 
standard  being  then  adopted  as  printed  on  pages  520-21. 

Every  reader  can  observe,  by  comparison  with  the  previous  standard, 
that  there  was  a  wise  and  conservative  strengthening  of  the  rules  all  along 
the  line.  The  next  step  contemplated  by  Mr.  Wallace  was  not  only  a  further 
restricting  revision  on  blood  lines,  but  also  an  increase  in  the  speed  rate 
required,  an  advance  from  2:30  to  2:25,  then  ultimately  to  2:20,  his  pur- 
pose being  that  the  standard  should  keep  pace  with  the  progress  of  the 
breed.  But  before  any  of  these  steps  were  made  the  "Register"  passed 
into  other  hands — and  other  theories  and  practices  have  prevailed,  with 
the  result  that  the  standard  is  to-day  held  in  derision  and  the  value  of  the 
"Register"  has  sunk  to  the  vanishing  point.  But  before  reaching  this 
phase  of  our  history  some  account  of  Mr.  Wallace's  other  publications  is  in 
order. 

"WALLACE'S  MONTHLY." 

At  a  very  early  period  in  the  history  of  the  "  Trotting  Register"  Mr. 
Wallace  perceived  the  necessity  of  there  being  some  medium  of  communi- 
cation with  the  breeders  which  he  could  control.  This  was  one  of  several 
reasons,  which  need  not  here  be  detailed,  the  outcome  of  which  was  the 
establishment  of  the  publication  which  has  played  a  greater  part  than  any 
other  in  developing  tue  trotting  literature  of  to-day,  and  in  leading  Amer- 
ican thought  on  the  science  of  breeding—  Wallace's  Monthly.  The  first 
number  came  out  in  October,  1875,  with  Benjamin  Singerly,  publisher, 
and  John  H.  Wallace,  editor.  Mr.  Singerly  was  an  uncle  of  Hon.  William 
M.  Singerly,  of  the  Philadelphia  Record,  and  had  large  printing  establish- 
ments in  Harrisburg  and  Pittsburg,  Pa.  The  first  twelve  numbers  of 
Wallaces  Monthly  were  printed  in  Harrisburg,  though  published  from  the 
outset  from  New  York.  Benjamin  Singerly  died  in  August,  1876,  from 
which  time  Mr.  Wallace  carried  on  the  publication  himself,  from  the  little 
office  at  170  Fulton  Street,  overlooking  St.  Paul's  churchyard. 

In  accordance  with  the  time-honored  custom  in  journalism,  the  first 
number  of  Wallace's  Monthly  contained  a  salutatory  outlining  its  purposes 
and  its  policy,  and  in  almost  every  detail  that  policy  was  honestly  lived  up 
to  while  Mr.  Wallace  controlled  the  magazine.  The  horse  was  to  be  made  the 
leading,  but  not  the  exclusive  feature;  full  trotting  and  running  summaries 


APPENDIX.  555 

indexes  were  to  be  published;  correspondence  was  invited;  and,  as  a 
cardinal  principle  of  polby,  gambling  in  any  and  all  forms  was  to  be  un- 
compromisingly fought  against.  This  last  detail  of  policy  Mr.  Wallace 
rigidly  adhered  to  always.  He  opposed  public  betting  in  any  form  and 
under  any  pretense,  and  believed,  and  acted  up  to  the  belief,  that  if  racing 
could  not  be  maintained  without  betting  it  were  better  that  grass  should 
grow  on  the  tracks.  The  first  number  of  the  Monthly  contained  a 
descriptive  article  by  "  Hark  Comstock,"  and  some  selected  matter,  but 
was  chiefly  the  editor's  work— mostly  concise  historical  matter,  dealing 
with  the  early  progenitors  of  the  trotting  breed. 

"With  each  number  the  Monthly  strengthened,  until  soon  it  had  gath- 
ered around  it  the  brightest  writers  in  the  country.  Notwithstanding  this, 
however,  the  editorial  department  was  always  its  strongest  feature,  and  it 
rapidly  became  a  power  in  the  Ian  1 .  Among  the  earliest  contributors  were 
"Hark  Comstock"  (Peter  0.  Kellogg),  always  a  fluent  writer,  and  one  of 
the  most  versatile  special  pleaders  on  horse  topics  known  to  the  turf  press; 
Charles  J.  Foster,  the  gifted  "Privateer,"  whose  work,  from  a  literary 
standpoint,  was  oftentimes  a  model  of  finish;  "  Yah  Amerikanski"  (Spen- 
cer Borden),  and  "S.  T.  H."  (S.  T.  Harris),  both  brilliant,  especially  in 
controversy;  H.  T.  Helm,  Levi  S.  Gould,  and  many  others  prominently 
known  in  turf  literature  a  quarter  of  a  century  ago. 

Spirited  controversy  early  became  a  feature  of  the  Monthly,  and  in  these 
passages-at-arms  the  editor  was  generally  found  taking  a  leading  hand. 
As  a  writer  Mr.  Wallace  was  always  above  all  things  forceful.  He  fortified 
himself  in  theory  and  fact  amply,  and  his  style  was  so  direct,  yet  compre- 
hensive, that  every  shot  told,  and  even  those  who  disagreed  with  him  were 
forced  to  read  and  admire  these  spirited  discussions.  Mr.  Wallace  more- 
over early  impressed  the  public  with  his  uncompromising  honesty,  and 
with  the  fact  that,  above  all  things,  he  had  the  courage  of  his  convictions. 
There  was  no  dodging  issues,  no  dallying  or  compromising  with  humbug 
of  any  sort;  a  spade  was  called  a  spade,  and  no  consideration  of  "policy" 
brought  a  note  of  indirection  into  the  Monthly's  editorial  pages.  The 
personality  of  the  editor  was  ineffaceably  stamped  on  his  magazine,  and 
its  influence  became  potent  for  good  far  beyond  the  limitations  of  mere 
circulation. 

The  magazine  became  quickly  the  leader  in  thought  on  breeding  sub- 
jects, and  hardly  an  advanced  idea  that  to-day  prevails  in  this  field  of 
literature  but  can  be  found  first  suggested  in  the  Monthly.  The  first 
taole  of  trotters  under  their  sires  was  published  in  Wallace's  Monthly  for 
1877;  the  standard  was  first  suggested  in  its  pages;  the  pacer  as  an  origin 
of  trotting  speed  was  first  advanced  in  February  and  March,  1883;  it  was 
the  first  to  formulate  and  advocate  and  put  to  the  test  a  scale  of  points  for 
judging  horses;  and  above  all  it  was  the  power  that  educated  breeders  to 
an  understanding  of  breeding  on  truly  scientific  principles,  and  brought 
about  an  acceptance  and  appreciation  of  the  laws  of  heredity  as  applied  to 


556  THE    HOESE    OF    AMEEICA. 

breeding  the  trotter.  And,  interspersed  with  this  continual  seeking  for 
the  light  and  the  right,  there  was  an  amount  of  historical  matter  pub- 
lished that  would  make  the  compilation  of  a  valuable  book  on  the  Ameri- 
can trotter  possible  from  the  Monthly  alone.  It  was,  moreover,  continu- 
ally exposing  frauds  of  history  and  of  pedigrees,  and  was  as  potent  in 
guarding  as  it  was  in  discovering  the  truth.  It  was  the  recognized  enemy 
of  fraud,  of  humbug,  of  false  pretense  everywhere,  and  attacked  them  in 
high  places  as  well  as  low,  and  that  its  editor  incurred  the  enmity  of  many 
whose  designs  attracted  the  Monthly's  searchlight,  and  were  thwarted 
by  it,  is  a  fact  known  of  all  men. 

This,  in  brief,  \vas  the  character  of  the  Monthly  from  its  foundation, 
until  it  passed  out  of  Mr.  Wallace's  hands.  To  follow  its  detailed  history 
through  the  nearly  sixteen  years  of  Mr.  Wallace's  editorship  is  not  the 
purpose  of  this  article,  but  the  rather  to  group  the  salient  factors  that 
made  it  what  it  was,  and  that  have  secured  for  it  an  enduring  place  in 
trotting  history. 

The  Monthly  was  from  the  first  illustrated,  and  the  progress  in  horse 
art  is  well  demonstrated  by  tracing  through  its  pages.  Its  first  drawings 
were  made  by  James  C.  Beard,  who  came  of  a  race  of  artists,  but  whose 
attempts  at  horse  portraits  were  wretched  caricatures,  one  and  all.  Still, 
they  seemed  to  be  the  best,  or  rather  the  least  bad,  then  obtainable.  Mr. 
Wallace,  however,  was  painfully  cognizant  of  the  lack  of  truthful  por- 
traits of  horses,  and  was  not  less  delighted  than  surprised  when,  one  Sep- 
tember day  in  1878,  a  young  man  came  into  his  office,  and  exhibited 
drawings  that  were  so  obviously  truthful  portraitures  that  they  were  a 
revelation  in  horse  art.  A  rapid  questioning  as  to  whether  he  had  drawn 
them,  and  where  he  had  hidden  his  light  so  long,  developed  that  the  young 
genius  was  Herbert  S.  Kittredge,  of  Pennsylvania.  He  was  immediately 
engaged,  and  his  work  in  the  Monthly  was  the  first  reputable  horse  por- 
traiture in  American  literature.  This  gifted,  self-educated  genius  died  in 
May,  1881,  long  before  his  prime,  and  when  his  powers  were  daily  develop- 
ing. He  was  the  forerunner  of  Whitney,  Dickey,  Morris,  and  others 
whose  ability  to  faithfully  portray  horses  is  acknowledged  to-day.  He 
had  not  the  mechanical  aids — notably  the  camera — or  processes  which 
they  so  freely  call  into  play,  but  in  true  artistic  ability  to  draw  faithfully, 
it  is  doubtful  whether  this  undeveloped  master  was  the  inferior  of  any 
artist  who  has  yet  made  horse  portraiture  a  specialty  in  any  country. 

From  year  to  year  the  contributory  staff  of  Wallace's  Monthly  increased, 
and  always  had  in  its  membership  a  number  of  the  leading  breeders  and 
students.  For  many  years  Mr.  Wallace  did  practically  all  the  editorial 
work  himself,  as  in  fact  he  did  the  registration  work.  But  this  gradually 
outgrew  him,  and  soon  his  office  staff  began  to  increase.  First  he  removed 
the  office  to  212  Broadway,  not  far  from  its  first  location.  Then  in  May, 
1887,  the  final  move  was  made  to  commodious  offices  in  the  Stewart  Build- 
ing, at  Broadway  and  Chambers  Street,  when  the  office  staff  had  grown 


APPENDIX.  557 

until  more  than  a  dozen  assistants  were  employed  on  all  the  publi- 
cations. 

Among  the  earliest  editorial  assistants  on  the  Monthly  was  C.  T.  Harris, 
later  trotting  editor  of  the  Spirit  of  the  Times,  and  still  more  recently  of 
The  Horse  Review,  a  faithful  and  conscientious  worker.  Later  Gurney  0. 
Gue,  a  clever  writer,  and  exceptionally  well  grounded  in  facts  of  pedigree 
and  record,  occupied  a  desk  with  the  Monthly,  and  is  now  one  of  Mr. 
Dana's  "bright  young  men"  on  the  Sun.  In  1886  Leslie  E.  Macleod  be- 
came associate  editor,  and  continued  in  that  capacity  until  1890.  He 
subsequently  became  managing  editor  of  The  Horseman,  and  later  edito- 
rial writer  of  The  Horse  Review. 

Of  contributors,  among  the  best  known  may  be  named,  in  addition  to 
those  enumerated  as  identified  with  the  Monthly  at  the  start,  General  B. 
F.  Tracy,  Allen  W.  Thompson,  Samuel  Hough  Terry,  "Mark  Field"  (Jas. 
M.  Hiatt),  "O.  W.  C."  (O.  W.  Cook),  Thos.  B.  Armitage,  "Mambrino" 
(H.  D.  McKinney),  Otto  Holstein,  "Bill  Arp,"  "Aurelius"  (Rev.  T.  A. 
Hendrick),  A.  B.  Allen,  "Fidelis,"  Harvey  W.  Peck,  Benjamin  W.  Hunt, 
"Roland"  (Leslie  E.  Macleod),  Major  Campbell  Brown,  F.  G.  Smith, 
Judge  M.  W.  Oliver,  Prof.  Chas.  T.  Luthy,  Colonel  F.  G.  Buford,  John 
P.  Ray,  "Vision"  (W.  H.  Marrett),  H.  C.  Goodspeed,  and  others. 

The  last  number  of  Wallace's  Monthly  issued  under  Mr.  Wallace's 
editorship  was  published  in  July,  1891.  It  then  passed  to  the  American 
Trotting  Register  Company,  at  Chicago,  and  its  degeneration  was  rapid, 
and  in  a  few  months  it  died  for  lack  of  brains.  Robbed  of  its  virility  and 
of  its  purpose,  without  editorial  direction,  and  aiming  only  to  lead  a 
harmless  existence,  and  to  say  or  do  nothing  to  offend  any  one  of  a  score 
of  directors  and  hundreds  of  stockholders,  it  soon  began  to  lead  a  useless 
existence,  and  dropped  out  of  the  notice  of  thinking  men.  It  became  the 
antithesis  of  all  that  it  had  been,  and  its  end  was  a  pitiable  one  for  a 
publication  with  a  history  of  sixteen  years  of  fearless,  honest,  able 

direction. 

"  WALLACE'S  YEAR  BOOK." 

Early  in  the  history  of  the  Monthly  Mr.  Wallace  decided  to  drop  run- 
ning summaries,  and  give  exclusive  attention  to  trotting  and  pacing 
statistics.  These  grew  so  rapidly  that  they  soon  became  burdensome,  and 
an  outlet  became  inevitable.  Furthermore  the  adoption  of  the  standard, 
depending  as  it  did  on  records  of  performances,  necessitated  for  its  appli- 
cation a  bureau  of  statistics,  and  these  considerations  and  others— not  the 
least  of  which  was  the  recognition  of  "  a  long-felt  want " — prompted  Mr. 
Wallace  to  start  "Wallace's  Year  Book."  The  first  volume  of  this  valu- 
able annual  was  published  in  May,  1886,  covering  the  performances  for 
1885.  and  contained,  besides  summaries  of  all  races  in  which  a  heat  was 
trotted  in  2:50  or  less,  a  2:30  list  for  the  year,  and  the  Great  Table  of 
Trotters  under  their  sires.  The  book  contained  273  pages,  was  bound  in 
flexible  cloth,  and  sold  at  $1. 


558  THE   HORSE   OF   AMERICA. 

An  improvement  of  the  greatest  value  and  importance  was  made  in  the- 
Great  Table  in  the  first  volume  of  the  "Year  Book."  This  was  the  addi- 
tion after  the  list  of  performers  under  each  sire  of  the  names  of  his  sons 
that  had  sired  performers,  with  the  number  to  the  credit  of  each,  and  of 
the  performers  out  of  his  daughters.  It  furnished  at  a  glance  what  a 
horse  had  done,  not  only  of  himself,  but  through  his  sons  and  daughters, 
and  the  Great  Table  thus  improved  became  at  once  the  gauge  of  trotting 
blood  by  which  breeders  everywhere  estimated  the  comparative  values  of 
the  different  families  and  different  sires.  It  was  the  most  clear,  con- 
densed, yet  comprehensive  and  perfect  summing  up  of  all  the  facts  and 
experiences  of  trotting  history  imaginable,  and  so  apparent  is  this  f act- 
that  nothing  original  has  ever  been  attempted  to  replace  it,  while  all  com- 
pilers, without  exception,  imitate  it.  The  Great  Table  of  itself  would 
have  carried  any  book  to  success. 

The  second  volume  of  the  "  Year  Book,"  330  pages,  contained  in  addi- 
tion to  the  same  class  of  matter  as  its  predecessor,  tables  of  sires  and 
dams,  great  brood  mares,  and  fastest  records.  Still  further  improvements 
were  made  in  every  year.  Volume  VI.,  published  for  1890,  was  a  hand- 
somely bound  book  of  642  pages,  with  summaries  of  all  races  in  which 
heats  were  trotted  or  paced  in  2:40  or  better,  list  of  best  records  slower 
than  2:40,  complete  2:30  lists  with  extended  pedigrees,  the  Great  Table 
with  the  pedigrees  of  the  sires  extended,  list  of  2:20  trotters  according  to 
records,  list  of  2:20  trotters  under  their  sires,  list  of  great  brood  mares, 
sires  of  dams,  mares  the  dams  of  producing  sons  or  daughters,  tables  of 
fastest  records,  champion  trotters  from  1845  to  1890,  champions  at  all 
ages  from  yearlings  to  five-year-olds,  champion  stallions,  table  of  2:20 
pacers,  and  of  2:30  pacers  under  sires.  No  such  comprehensive  and 
valuable  mass  of  statistics  was  ever  arranged,  and  this  volume  was  in 
itself  a  perfect  encyclopedia  of  trotting  literature. 

No  eulogy  of  the  "Year  Book"  is  necessary,  for  every  farmer's  boy 
knew  before  it  was  three  years  old  that  it  was  indispensable  to  all  horse- 
men. It  instantly  bounded  into  a  place  of  authority,  and  to  thousands 
who  felt  the  "Kegister"  out  of  reach  it  was  at  once  "Stud  Book"  and 
"Eacing  Calendar,"  and  none  of  Mr.  Wallace's  creations  performed  a 
wider  public  service,  or  attained  a  popularity  so  broadcast  and  sudden. 
The  new  work  was  peculiarly  fortunate  in  having  back  of  it  the  authority 
of  the  "Kegister,"  and  the  prestige  of  a  name  that  had  already  become 
world-wide  as  rendering  everything  it  bore  authoritative — but  even  allow- 
ing for  these  advantages  the  quick  popular  indorsement  of  the  "Year 
Book  "  was  an  eloquent  testimony  to  the  wisdom  of  its  plan. 

CONCLUSION. 

The  Wallace  Trotting  Kegister  Company,  with  a  capital  of  $100,000,  was 
organized  in  1889,  and  October  1,  of  that  year,  all  the  publications  be- 


APPENDIX.  559 

came  the  property  of  this  company.  The  last  chapter  of  this  book  details 
the  final  transfer  to  the  American  Trotting  Register  Association  in  1891. 

With  the  fortunes  of  the  Wallace  publications  since  that  transfer  it  may 
be,  perhaps,  questioned  whether  this  sketch  has  anything  to  do,  and  yet 
it  would  seem  incomplete  without  the  sequel.  As  already  stated,  Wallace's 
Monthly  degenerated  to  nothing  and  died.  The  "Year  Book  "  has  been 
emasculated  until  it  is  but  a  shadow,  incomplete  and  unsatisfactory,  of 
what  it  was,  and  is  notoriously  published  at  a  loss.  Its  once  great  tables 
are  cut  from  their  complete  state  to  be  merely  the  tables  of  a  single  year, 
and  where  one  complete  "Year  Book  "was  in  the  Wallace  regime  the 
only  hand-book  necessary,  now  the  student  must  rummage  through  half 
a  dozen,  more  or  less,  'to  ascertain  the  simplest  series  of  facts.  The 
standard  has  been  mismanaged,  revisions  have  been  made  and  rescinded, 
and  no  advance  has  been  made  in  the  speed  qualifications,  though  2:20 
trotters  are  as  common  to-day  as  2:30  trotters  were  in  1891.  In  con- 
sequence, registration  has  fallen  away,  and  from  being  a  good  purchase 
at  $130,000  in  1891,  the  "Register"  properties  to-day  are  rated  so 
dubiously  far  below  par  as  to  make  the  expression  of  their  value 
in  figures  hardly  possible.  That  a  period  of  "hard  times"  came  shortly 
after  the  purchase  of  the  "Register"  is  true — but  the  practical  wrecking 
of  the  Wallace  publications  cannot  be  accounted  for  solely  on  the  theory 
of  business  depression. 

Such  in  brief  outline  has  been  the  story  of  the  founding  of  these  works, 
which  in  their  own  upbuilding  helped  incalculably  to  upbuild  one  of  the 
nation's  great  industries.  The  present  works  may  be  destroyed  or  pass 
away,  but  the  true  Wallace  works  cannot.  Mr.  Wallace's  works  have  a 
place  in  horse  history,  secure,  unique,  alone.  Created,  we  might  say  from 
nothing,  they  each  and  all  grew  and  prospered  in  his  care  and  guidance, 
and  became  powers  for  good  and  auxiliaries  of  industry.  If  he  is  a  bene- 
factor who  causes  two  blades  of  grass  to  grow  where  one  grew  before,  how 
much  the  more  is  he  whose  labor  and  genius  have  enriched  ten  thousand 
farms,  and  been  the  most  potent  single  influence  in  developing  a  produc- 
tive industry  the  extent  of  which  can  only  be  estimated  in  millions.  Mr. 
Wallace's  works  will  live  after  him.  In  speaking  once  on  the  transient 
nature  of  fame,  a  distinguished  lawyer,  a  man  of  national  reputation,  said: 
"After  I  am  gone  I  will  be  remembered  as  a  successful  lawyer  among 
many  other  successful  lawyers,  but  Mr.  Wallace's  name  will  live  as  long  as 
a  horse  exists  on  the  earth."  We  rarely  judge  contemporaries  justly.  It 
needs  the  softening  perspective  of  time  in  which  to  lose  the  dimming  prej- 
udices of  the  present;  and  however  much  these  works  may  be  appreciated 
to-day,  their  true  worth,  what  they  accomplished,  and  the  productive 
genius,  purposeful  industry,  and  plain,  consistent  honesty  from  which  they 
were  evolved  will  only  be  clearly  seen  and  fully  conceded  by  the  historian 
of  the  future. 


INDEX. 


311,  316,  332,336, 


AbdlaMAlexa-der'sX  History  of,  272,  294, 

296.  297.  298,  299. 
Abdallah  Chief  CBortXJlL 
Abdallah,  History  of,  255,  261. 
\bdallah  Mambrmo,  299. 
Abdallah  Pilot,  297. 
Aberdeen.  275.  311,  414 
Abiri  (strong  horses),  39. 
Abraham  in  Egypt,  36. 
tcquired  Characters  and  Instincts,  471. 
ic?elius.  Rev.  I.,  Colonial  Writer,  137,  179. 
Ada  C.,  443. 


Adams1  Stump,  359. 

Adams,  Zach.,  349. 

Administrator,  275. 

\drian  Wilkes,  288. 

Adval,  Johannes.  28 

Advance  of  Standard,  523,  524. 

Advertiser,  493. 

Aguilillas,  472. 

Albert  W.,  293. 

Albion,  295,  451. 

Alcantara.  288. 

Alcyone,  288. 

Alderman.  450. 


,  421, 


,  506,  516. 


Alexanders'  Edwin  Forrest, 

Alexander's  Norman.    (See  Norman) 
Alexander's  Pilot  Jr.    (See  Pilot  Jr.) 
Alfred  (Imported),  343,  417. 
Algeria.  44. 
Alix,  306,  477. 


Abdallah,  Alex- 
(See  Edwin  For- 


Allen,  Philip,  349. 

Allen,  William  Russell,  538. 

Allerton,  288. 

Allerton,  Isaac,  110,  181. 

Allie  Gaines.  299. 

Allie  West,  299. 


,, 

Almonarch.  299. 
Almont,  304,  463. 
Almont.  History  of.  297. 
Almont  Jr.  (1764),  299. 
Almont  Jr.  (1829),  299,  407. 
Almont's  Leading  Sons,  299. 
Altamont,  299. 


rlW.  159.  160,  161,  162,  163,  192, 
tabling  Horses,  157,  158,  159,  160,  161,  162,  163. 


Ambulatura,  The,  157. 

"America  Dissected,"  Extract  from,  176. 

American  Commander,  243. 

American  Eclipse,  318, 334, 363, 432, 446, 447, 448, 

449,  450,  488. 

American  Eclipse.  Pedigree  of,  446-450. 
American  Girl,  286. 
American  Hiatoga,  365. 
American  Native  Race  Horses,  96,  105. 
American  Pacer  and  Relation   to  American 

Trotter,  172-189. 
American  Race  Horse,  Origin  of,  92,  96-105, 

106. 

American  Race  Horse,  The,  8,  42,  90-107. 
American  Saddle  Horse,  190-195. 
American  Star  (Seely's),  303,  308,  311,  312,  338, 
339,  340,  341,  503. 

American  Star  (Conklin's),  341. 

American  Star  Family,  338-341. 

American  Star  (Seely's),  History  of,  338-341. 

American  Star's  Services,  340. 

American  Stud  Book  (Bruce's),  104. 

American    Stud  Book.     <See  also  Wallace's 
American  Stud  Book.) 

American  Stud  Book  (Wallace's),  101-104,  459. 

American  Trotting  Register,  390,  412,  459,  460. 

American  Trotting  Register  Association,  536- 
545,  557-559. 

American  Turf  Register,  97. 

American  Wild  Horses,  196-204. 

Amy.  313. 

Ancestors  of  Messenger,  205-221. 

Anderson,  John,  438,  439,  443. 

Andrew  Jackson,  327,  329,  336,  498. 

Andrew  Jackson,  History  of,  323-325. 

Andrew  Jackson,  Jr.,  327. 

Andrus  Horse.  265. 

Andrus,  Mr.,  265. 

Andy  Johnson,  329. 

Angelica  Mare,  413. 

AngUn,  Timothy,  501,  505. 

Anteeo,  ^93. 

Anteros,  293. 

Antevolo,  293. 

Antiquity  of  American  Racing,  90. 
Antiquity  of  Narragansett  Pacers,  180. 
Antiquity  of  the  Pacing  Horse,  16, 154-171, 180, 

Antiquity  of  Trotters  and  Pacers,  401. 

Arab  Barb,  93. 

Arabia  (see  also  Arabia  Felix,  Arabia  Deserta, 

and  Yemen),  2,  5,  39,  40,  41,  42,  43,  44-95. 
Arabia  (no  horses  at  Christian  era),  27-42. 
Arabia  Deserta  (see  also  Arabia),  4,  40,  55. 
Arabia  Felix  (see  also  Arabia.  Arabia  Deserta, 

and  Yemen),  2,  4,  42,  43,  55. 
Arabia,  First  Horses  in,  28. 
Arabian  Blood  (see  also  Arabia,  etc.),  167,  168. 
Arabian  Horse,  The,  51-66. 
"Arabians,"  so-called  (imported),  93,  94,  95. 
Arabian  Horse.    (See  Arabia,  Arabia  Deserta, 

Yemen,  Arabs,  etc.) 

Arabian  (Lindsay's).    (See  Lindsay's  Arabian.) 
Arab  Horses,  A.  Keene  Richards',  64,  65,  66. 
Arabian  Traditions,  5,  455. 


5G2 


INDEX. 


Arab  Horses,  President  Grant's,  64. 

Arab  Horses  in  America,  64,  65,  66. 

Arabs  (English  Foundation  Stock),  68-72. 

Arabia,  Wild  Horses  of,  26. 

Ararat,  Mt.,  28,  32. 

Aratus  (by  Director),  357. 

Aratus  (Phare's),  357. 

Aratus  (Pugh's),  356. 

Archer,  402. 

Argyll,  Captain,  Raids  Port  Royal,  143. 

Arion,  292,  294,  477,  493. 

Armenia,  2,  3,  28,  29,  30,  32,  33,  34,  39. 

Armenian  Kings,  29. 

Armitage,  Thomas  B.,  557. 

Arnold,  Azariah,  236,  260. 

Art  in  Portraying  Horses,  556. 

Amazonia,  20,  257,  259. 

Appendix:  History  of   the  Wallace  Publica- 

cations,  547-559. 
Ashford,W.  H.,  151. 
Asia  Minor,  Eastern,  30. 
Asia,  Western,  32. 
Assyria,  39. 
Astor,  Henry,  229. 
Arhamo,  294. 
Atkinson,  William,  248. 
Atlantic,  299. 
Auburn  Horse,  346. 
"Aurelius,"  557. 
Australian  (Imported),  420. 
Austin,  G.  A.,  265. 
Ayers,  E.  W.,  501. 
Ay  res,  F.  J.,  350. 
Axtell,  288. 
Azote,  294. 


Babcock,  Mr.,  313. 

Backus,  Scobey  &  Burlew,  345. 

Backman,  Charles,  283,  289,  290,  291,  413,  414, 

415,  501,  503, 
Badger  (Imported),  95. 
Bad  Qualities,  Heredity  of,  478. 
Bagg  &  Goodrich,  360. 

Bailey  Brothers1  English  Racing  Register,  83. 
Baker,  I.  V.,  Jr.,  382. 
Balch,  Wesley  P.,  357. 
Bald  Chief.    (*ee  Bay  Cheif.) 
Bald  Galloway,  84,  85,  163,  213,  410. 
Bald  Stockings  (Tom  Hal),  358,  359. 
Baldwin,  B.  H.,  382. 

Bancroft,  Historian,  on  Wild  Horse,  201. 
Barbs  (English  Foundation  Stock),  68,  72,  80. 
Barbs,  81,  82,  85. 
Barker,  Henry  L.,  350,  362. 
Baronet  (Imported),  334,  447. 
Baronet,  259. 
Baron  Wilkes,  288. 
Barnes,  Mr.,  150. 
Barss,  392,  395,  396. 
Bartlett's  Turk,  346. 
Bashaws,  21. 
Bashaw  (Imported),  92. 
Bashaw  (Green's),  282,  283,  327,  469. 
Bashaw  Jr.,  308. 
Bashaws  and  Clays,  321-337. 
Bassinger,  432.  436. 
Bathgate,  A.,  151. 
Bay  Chief,  295. 
Bay  Chief,  Pedigree  of,  418. 
Bay  Kentucky  Hunter,  362. 
Bay  Messenger  (Downing's),  316. 
Bay  Morgan,  364. 
Beard,  James  C.,  Artist,  556. 
Bear  Grass,  342. 
Beautiful  Bay  (True  Briton  or  Traveler),  367- 

763. 

Beautiful  Bells,  297,  332. 
Beck,  348. 
Beckwith,  Mr.,  282. 


Belgrade  Turk,  69. 

Bell  Bord,  292. 

Bell  Boy,  293. 

Belle  (dam  of  Green's  Bashaw),  276,  283. 

Belle  (dam  of  Belmont),  299. 

Belle  (by  Top  Bellfounder),  335. 

Belle  Brandon,  313,  314. 

Belle  F.,  311. 

Belle  Loup,  299. 

Belle  Rice,  313. 

Belle  Strickland.  502. 

Belle  of  Wabash,  432,  434,  435,  436,  437. 

Bellflower,  294. 

Bellfounder  (Imported),  282,  335. 

Bellfounder  Family,  396,  397,  400,  401. 

Bellfounder  (Brown's),  299,  399. 

Bellfounder  (Kissam's),  399. 

Bellfounder  (La  Tourett's),  400. 

Bellows,  John,  377,  380. 

Belmont,  297,  298,  299. 

Belmont's  Leading  Sons,  300. 

Benedict,  James  W.,  294. 

Benger,  Thomas,  224,  225. 

Ben  Higdon,  355. 

Ben  Hur,  Famous  Pen  Picture  from,  66. 

Bennett  &  Jones,  437. 

Bertrand,  437. 

Bet,  353. 

Bett,  346. 

Betty  Bloss,  402. 

Betsy  Baker,  237. 

Betsy  Ransom,  334. 

Beuzetta.  28S,  305. 

Beverley's  History  of  Virginia,  111. 

Bidwell,  George,  433. 

Big  Mary,  502. 

Big  Shakespeare  (Probasco's),  355. 

"  Bill  Arp."  557. 

Billington,  Mr.,  150. 

Billy  Duroc,  345. 

Bird,  345. 

Bishop,  Isaac,  234. 

Bishop's  Hambletonian.    (See  Hambletonian.V 

Bitugue  Horses  (Russian),  393,  394. 

Black  and  All  Black,  261. 

Black  Arab  Barb,  93. 

Black  Bashaw,  322. 

Black  Hawk,  349,  376,  377,  381,  433,  498. 

Black  Hawk  Family,  366,  389. 

Black  Hawk  (Vernol's),  282,  327. 

Black  Hawk  (Seely's),  283. 

Black  Hawk  Prophet,  265. 

Blackie,  360. 

Black  Jin,  279,  280. 

Black  Messenger,  249. 

Black  River  Messenger,  361,  362. 

Black  Prince  (Scobey's),  346. 

Black  Rose,  Pedigree  of,  419 

Black  Warrior  (Warrior),  149.  150. 

Blackwood,  350. 

Blanco,  357,  358. 

Blandine,  350. 

Blank,  70,  402. 

Blauvelt,  John  G.,  250,  339. 

Blaze,  208,  209,  211,  402. 

Blessing,  The,  Voyage  of,  109. 

Blind  Tuckahoe,  365. 

Bloody  Buttocks,  70. 

Blue  Bull  (Wilson's),  352,  353,  354. 

Blue  Bull,  274. 

Blue  Bull  Family,  352,  354. 

Blundeville,  Thomas,  Early  English  Writer,. 
159,  160,  161,  170,  175. 

Blunt,  Wilfred  S.,  Experiences  of,  with  Ara- 
bian Horses,  5,  6,  7,  61,  62,  63. 

Board  of  Censors,  518,  552. 

Bob  Johnson,  439,  443. 

Bodine,  302. 

Bogus,  361. 

Bogus  Hunter,  361. 


IXDEX. 


563 


Bolingbroke,  Lord,  216. 

Bolivar  (Plotter's),  415. 

Bonesetter,  359. 

Bone  Swinger,  261. 

Bonita,  292. 

Bonner,  A.  A.,  304. 

Bonner,  David,  304. 

Bonnie  Scotland,  482,  514,  525,  527,  552. 

Boott,  James,  397. 

Borden,  Spencer,  156,  555. 

Boston,  420,  422,  424.  450,  451,  487,  488. 

Boston  Girl,  325.  363. 

Bos  well,  Dr.,  358. 

Bourbon  Wilkes.  288. 

Bradhurst.  Samuel,  333. 

Bradley,  W.  J..  343. 

Brasfleld,  George,  304. 

Brawner's  Eclipse,  439, 443. 

Breckenridge,  William  L.,  358. 

Breeders'  Association,  National.    (See  National 

A.  T.  H.  B.) 

Breeding  the  Trotter  a  New  Industry,  508. 
Breeding  the  Trotting  Horse,  456. 
Breeding  from  Developed  Parents,  499,  507. 
Breeders  of  2:15  Trotters,  501. 
Breeders'  Trotting  Stud  Book,  528,  533. 
Brewster,  Dr.,  363. 
Brickmaker  (Andrew  Jackson),  325. 
Bright  John,  365. 
Bright  PhcBbus,  233,  252. 
Bristol  Horse,  150. 
Bristol  Grey,  261. 
Britain,  Early  Horses,  48,  49. 
Britain,  First  Horses  of,  157-171. 
Britain,  Time  of  Julius  Caesar,  157. 
British  Horses.  Early,  164,  165,  166. 
Brodhead,  Lucas.  419,  420,  422,  427,  438,  429, 431, 

441,  444.  526,  et  seq. 
Brokenlegged  Hunter,  362. 
Brown,  Mr.,  399. 
Brown,  David  W.,  365. 
Brown,  Henry  C.,  435,  436. 
Brown,  Major  Campbell,  359. 557. 
Brown's  Bellfounder.   (See  Bellfounder.) 
Brown  George,  385. 
Brown  Hal,  359. 

Brown  Highlander  (Imported),  361. 
Brown  Pilot.  350. 
Brown  Wilkes,  288. 
Bruce  (traveler),  31. 
Bruce,  G.  Benjamin,  305,  450,  458. 
Bruce's  Stud  Book,  104. 
Bruce,  Sanders  D.,  100,  104,  420,  423,  441. 
Buckley,  John,  334. 
Buffon,  26. 

Buford,  Col.  F.  G.,  557. 
Bull  Calf.  243. 
Bullock,  Mr.,  216,  222,  223. 
Bunbury,  Sir  Charles,  76. 
Burch  Mare,  350. 

Burckhardt  (traveler  in  Arabia),  54. 
Burdach,  469. 
Burlew,  Charles,  346. 
Burlew,  Scobey  &  Backus,  345. 
Burton,  Abram,  261. 
Burton  Horse,  261. 
Burtsell,  Dr.  Alex..  59. 
Bush,  Charles,  247. 
Bush,  Philo  C..  244.  245. 
Bush  Messenger,  20. 

Bush  Messenger.  (See  Ogden  Messenger.) 
Bush  Messenger.  (See  Messenger,  Bush's.) 
Byerly  Turk,  68. 


Cade.  70.  84.  163,  213. 

Cadet,  407. 

Cadiz  (Gades),  44. 

Cadmus  (by  American  Eclipse),  354. 

Cadmus  (Iron's).  354,  358,  414. 


California  Patchen.    (See  George  M.  Patchen 

Jr.) 

Camel  ("the  ship  of  the  desert"),  52. 
Camilla,  24*. 
Campbell,  M.  C.,  360. 
Campdown,  310. 
Canada,  13,  15,  16. 

Canada,  Early  Horse  History,  142,  143. 
Canadian  Maritime  Provinces,  152. 
Canadian  Pacer,  Origin  of  the,  142,  143,  151, 

152,  153. 

Canavan,  George,  334. 
Cannon's  Whip,  419. 

Cappadocia.    (See  Cappadocian  Horses.') 
Cappadocian  Horses,  2,  28,  27,  29,  30,  31,  32,  33, 

34*  42. 

Captain  Beard,  439. 
Captain  Lyons,  312. 
Captain  Magowan.  432,  433,  482. 
Carlisle  Gelding,  410. 
Carman,  Charles.  330. 
Carman  Mare,  333-336. 
Carman,  R.  F.,  333,  334. 
Carpenter,  Lieutenant,  369,  375,  376. 
Carpenter,  Powell,  323. 
Carthage,  Horses  of,  44,  45,  48. 
Case,  Jerome  I.,  314. 
Case,  John,  349. 
Cassius  M.  Clay,  327. 
Cassius  M.  Clay,  History  of.  330-333. 
Cassius  M.  Clay,  329.  333. 
Cassius  M.  Clay  Jr.  (Neave's),  332. 
Cassius  M.  Clay  Jr.  (Strader's),  332,  333,  336. 
Cedar  Park  (Estate »,  74. 
Celtay  and  Iberi  (Spanish  tribes),  46. 
Centaur,  False  Pedigree  Given,  100,  101. 
Central  Truth  in  Breeding,  512. 
Chamich,  Rev.  M.,  28. 
Champion  (Grinnell's),  259,  344,  347. 
Champion  (807),  274. 
Champion  Family,  344-348. 
Champion  (Gooding's),  346,  347,  348. 
Champion  (Nighthawk),  347. 
Champion  (Scobey's  or  King's),  345. 
Charcoal  Sal.  324,  336. 
Charles  Hadley  Mare.  332. 
Charles  Kent  Mare.    (See  Kent  Mare.) 
Charles  II.,  King,  7,  14,  57,  58,  68,  135,  162,  168. 
Charley  B.,  346. 
Charlotte  Gray,  250. 
Charlotte  Temple,  322. 
Chenery,  W.  W.,  452. 

Chenery's  Grey  Eagle.    (See  Grey  Eagle.) 
Chestnut  Arabians,  70. 
Chestnut  Hill,  310. 
Chestnut  Hill  Farm,  309. 
Childers  (Imported),  95. 
Childers.    (See  Flying  Childers.) 
Chimes,  293. 

Chincoteague  Ponies,  The,  111. 
Chincoteague  WTild  Horses,  10,  11. 
Chinn,  Higgins.  358. 
Cholmondeley,|Marquis  of,  76. 
Cilicia.  30,  410. 
Clara  (Crazy  Jane),  149. 
Clara  (Dexter's  dam),  303. 
Clark  Chief,  318,  320. 
Clays  and  Bashaws,  21,  321-337. 
Clay.  James  B.,  315. 
Clay  Pilot,  297,  332. 
Cliff  Dwellers,  199. 
Clockfast,  450. 
Cobs,  398,  400. 
Cobwebs.  294. 

Cock,  Daniel  T.,  234,  241,  251. 
Cock,  Townsend,  234,  236. 
Cock  of  the  Rock,  338. 
Cockroft,  James  M.,  315. 
Coffein,  Goldsmith,  354,  356,  414. 
Coke,  Mr.,  70-73. 


564 


INDEX. 


Colden,  Cadwallader  R.,  98,  233,  234,  244,  247. 

Colden's  Magazine,  98. 

Coles,  Gen.  Nathaniel,  232,  233,  251,  252. 

Collateral  and  Indirect  Heredity,  464. 

Colonial  Horses,  9,  11, 108-141. 

Colonial  Horse  History,  108-141. 

Colonial  Running-Stock,  96. 

Columbus  (Old),  151. 

Commander,  243. 

Commissioner  of  Agriculture,  404,  405. 

"  Committee  on  Rules,"  The  Kentucky,  526, 

527,  528,  529. 
Commodore,  316. 
Compton  Barb,  70. 
Conductor,  294. 
Conestoga  Horses,  136. 
Conklin,  E.  K.,841. 
Conley,  John  W.,  304.  351. 
Connecticut,  Colonial  Horse  History,  131-133. 
Conqueror,  399. 
Constable,  Mr.,  447,  448. 
Constantius,  Emperor,  Sends  Horses  to  Arabia, 

2,  28,  31,  42,  43,  55. 
Consul,  365. 
Contemporaries  (Runningbred)  of  Messenger, 

Controller,  482. 

Copperbottom,  195. 

Copperbottoin  (Chinn's),  358. 

Copperbottoms,  433. 

Copeland,  294. 

Cook,  O.  W.,  132,  375,  557. 

Coomb  Arabian,  70. 

Cooper,  Arnos,  253. 

Cooper,  Benjamin  B.,  229. 

Cooper,  J.  F.,  Describes  Narragansett  Pacers, 

181. 

Cooper,  Richard  Isaac,  248. 
Cooper's  Gray,  5J53. 
Corbitt,  William,  501,  505. 
Cossack  Horses,  393. 
Cortez  Expedition  and  Horses,  18,  202. 
Coriander,  251. 
Count  Byram,  69. 
Count  Thoulouse,  69. 
Crabstick,  278,  279. 
Crabtree  Bellfounder,  332. 
Crane,  Mrs.,  361. 
Crazy  Jane  (Clara),  149. 
Croft's  Bay  Barb,  69. 
Cropped  Fagdown,  252. 
Cross  Heredity,  464. 
Cruger,  H.  N.,  247. 
Cuba,  Pacers  Exported  to,  173, 182. 
Cullea  Arabian,  70. 
Cumberland,  Duke  of,  77, 166. 
Cumming's  Whip,  359. 
Cummins,  Col.  F.  M.,  282. 
Curwen's  Bay  Barb,  69,  84. 
Cuyler,  275. 
Cynthia,  346. 

D 

Dabster  (Imported),  95. 

Daisy  Burns,  502. 

Dame  Winnie,  491,  492. 

Dam  of  Ethan  Allen,  384. 

Dam  of  Jay  Gould,  503. 

Dam  of  Messenger.    (See  Messenger.) 

Daniel  Lambert,  History  of,  389. 

Daniel  D.  Tompkins,  241,325. 

Dan:els,  P.  F.,  248. 

Danish  Horses,  165,  391. 

D'Arcy  White  Turk,  68. 

D'Arcy  Yellow  Turk,  69. 

Darius,  the  Mede,  30,  50. 

Darley,  Mr.,  58,  59,  69. 

Darley  Arabian,  58,  59,  69,  72,  106,  208,  410. 

Darwin,  Charles,  468,  471,  503. 

Dauntless,  275. 


Davis,  Jesse  M.,  345. 

Davis,  Barnes,  362. 

Dean,  Silas,  on  American  Saddle-Horse,  190. 

Dearing,  Jas.,  243. 

DeLancey,  Mr.,  Early  Turfman,  125,  126. 

DeLancey,  James.  368,  369,  370,  371,  375,  376. 

Delevan,  W.  A.,  453. 

Delight,  250 

Denmark  (Games'),  194, 195,  318. 

Descendants  of  Messenger,  255. 

Description  of  Electioneer,  290. 

Description  of  George  Wilkes,  285. 

Description  of  Hambletonian  (10),  268-270. 

Description  of  Messenger,  226-228. 

De  Soto,  Ferdinand,  18. 

De  Soto,  Expedition  and  Horses,  202. 

Developed  Speed,  Breeding  from,  499-507. 

Development,  Value  of,  499-507. 

Dewey,  Henry.  362. 

Dexter,  303.  317,  482. 

Dexter's  Race  with  Ethan  Allen  385-389. 

Dey,  Mr.,  437. 

Deyr,  Syrian  Horse  Market,  5,  62,  63. 

Dickey,  Robert  L.,  Artist,  556. 

Dictator.  275,  311. 

Dictator,  History  of,  303,  304. 

Dillon,  Jesse,  422,  423. 

Dine,  John  C.,  355. 

Diomed  (imported),  417,  447. 

Direct  Heredity,  464. 

Direct,  305. 

Directum,  305. 

Dirigo,  363. 

Disputed  Pedigrees,  Investigation  of,  409-455. 

Distribution  of  Horses,  Early,  36-50. 

Distribution  of  Trotters  in  United  States,  515. 

Doble,  Budd,  386. 

Dodsworth,  68. 

Doherty,  Mr.  (see  Royal  George),  150. 

Dole,  Charles  S.,  305. 

Doll,  361. 

Dolly,  304. 

Dolly  Spanker,  284,  285. 

Don  Horses,  393. 

Dorrel,  Daniel,  352. 

Dover  Messenger,  251. 

Downing,  Marcus,  316,  362. 

Draco,  286,  357. 

Draft  Horses  o '  Pennsylvania,  136. 

Drennon  (Brinker's),  195. 

Drew  Horse,  362,  363,  364. 

Drift,  308 

Driver,  302. 

Driver  (Reed's),  403. 

Dubois,  Cyrus,  339. 

Dubois,  James,  250. 

Dubois,  Major,  342. 

Duke  of  Cumberland,  77. 

Duke  of  Leeds,  76. 

Duke  of  Newcastle,  57,  58,  70, 80,  81, 87.  162, 167, 

170. 

Duke  of  Newcastle.    (See  Newcastle). 
Durgau,  Dr.,  454. 
Durkee,  Harrison,  304,  «51. 
Duroc,  338,  362,  417,  447. 
Duryea,  Garrett,  415. 
Dusenbury,  Theodore,  340. 
Dutch  Horses,  11, 12,  129,  172,  374,  375,  391,  392, 

396. 

Dutch  Horses  in  America,  91,  120,  121,  123. 
Dutch  Horses  in  New  England,  128,  129. 
Duvall,  William,  425,  426. 


Eagle  (Hunt's),  326. 

Earl  of  Cumberland,  166. 

Early  Bird,  305. 

Early  Distribution  of  Horses,  36,  50. 

Early  English  Racing,  83. 

Early  British  Horses,  79,  157,  171,  164,  165,  166. 


INDEX. 


565 


Early  English  Pacers,  158-171 . 

Early  Exportations  of  Pacers,  173,  182. 

Early  Colonal  Pacing  Races,  177,  178. 

Early  Pacing,  Philadelphia,  179. 

Early  Thoroughbred  Importations,  220. 

Early  American  Trotters.  456,  457,  515. 

Early  Horse  History,  Canada,  142,  153. 

Eastern  Asia  Minor,  30. 

Echo,  275. 

Eclipse  (Lawrence's)  332. 

Eclipse  (Brawner's),  439. 

Edgar's  Stud  Book,  99,  100,  101,  102, 104,  447, 

448,  516,  548,  549. 
Edsall.  Major,  295. 
Edsall's  Hambletonian,  295. 
Edward  Everett,  275. 
Edwin  Forrest,  325,  361,  362,  417,  457. 
Egbert,  275,  310. 
Egmont,  300. 
Egotist,  293. 

Egypt,  First  Horses  of,  2, 30,  36,  37, 38. 39, 41, 43. 
Eldridge.  Richard,  315. 
Electioneer,  History  of,  289-294. 
Electioneer,  275,  356,  413,  438,  463,  464,  503,  504. 
Electioneers  Leading  Sons,  293. 
Elector,  293. 
Elgin  Marbles,  156. 
Elliot,  Colonel.  451 . 
Ellzey.  Prof.  M.  C.,  74. 
Elphinstone,  Admiral,  391 
Ely,  George  H.,  501. 
Emerson,  Mr.,  349. 
Emma  Mills,  312. 
Emperor  Constantius,  79,  95. 
Enchantress.  305. 
Enemies  Made  by  Honest  Methods,  511,  512, 

534.  535. 

Engineer  (English),  212. 
Engineer,  History  of,  241-243. 
Engineer  H.,  251,  259,  344. 
Engineer  (Burdick's),  243,  266.  306. 
England,  First  Horses  of,  157-171. 
English  Foundation  Stock,  8,  68-72-106. 
English  Race  Horse,  The,  67-89. 
English  Race  Horses,  Native,  82, 86-92, 105, 106. 
English  Stud  Book,  83,  84,  87,  88,  106,  207,  216, 

217.  218,  548. 

English  Pacers,  84,  85,  86,  192,  193,  473. 
English  Race  Horses,  First  Importation  of, 

95. 

English  Trotters,  89. 
English  Hackney,  The,  400,  408. 
Eoff,  James  L.,  306,  349,  443. 
Ericsson,  318. 
Eros,  293. 
Escape,  146. 
"Esopus  Horses,1'1  122. 
Ethan  Allen,  History  of,  381-389. 
Ethan  Allen,  20,  274,  286,  334.  489. 
Ethan  Allen's  Race  with  Dexter,  385-389. 
Ethan  Allen  (Drury's),  265. 
Eton  Horse,  364. 

Euren,  Henry  F.,  169,  209,  402,  404,  405. 
European,  348. 

Exportations  of  Pacers,  Early,  173,  182. 
Extreme  Speed,  Breeders  of,  501. 
Eyclesheimer,  J.  L.  B.,  349. 
Ezekiel,  Prophet,  4,  32. 


Fagdown,  252. 

Fairlawn  Farm,  300,  501. 

Fallis,  293. 

Family  of  Mambrino  Chief,  315-320. 

Fancy  (by  Messenger),  322. 

Fanny,  346. 

Fanny  Cook,  389. 

Fanny  Kemble,  326. 

Fanny  Pullen,  241,  481. 

Fanny  Ransom,  334. 


Fantasy,  294. 

Fashion  Stud  Farm,  308,  501,  502,  503,  504,  505. 

Favorite  Wilkes,  288. 

Feagles,  David  R.,  271. 

Felter,  Col.  Harry,  284,  453. 

Ferguson,  George  W.,  362. 

Ferguson,  William,  360. 

Fictions  in  Early  Pedigrees,  104,  105. 

Fictitious  Pedigrees,  511,  512,  534,  535. 

"Fidelis,"557. 

Finnegan.  P.  A.,  335. 

Firetail,  365. 

First  Horses  in  Arabia,  28-31. 

First  Horses  Brought  to  America,  142. 

First  Importations  in  New  York,  120, 121,  122, 

123. 

First  Horses  in  New  England,  128,  129,  130. 
First  American  Racing,  122,  123,  124,  125,  126» 

134. 

First  American  Race  Course,  90. 
First  Racing  in  Virginia,  109,  110,  113. 
First  American  Horse  Advertisement,  130. 
First  Race-Horses  in  South  Carolina,  140. 
First  Trotting  Races,  456,  457. 
First  Importations  of  Thoroughbreds,  95,  96. 
First  Impregnations,  Influence  of.  465. 
First  Consul  (Bond's),  233,  322. 
Fisk,  A.  C.,  311. 
Fitz,  Stephen,  Early  English  Writer,  158, 159r 

170. 

Flanders  Horses,  81. 
Flanders  Mares,  160. 
Flora,  306. 

Flora  Temple,  235-306,  335,  361,  477,  498. 
Florizel,  450. 
Flying  Childers,  59,  208. 
Flying  Morgan,  382,  383. 
Forbes,  J.  Malcolm,  538. 
Forshee  Horse,  150. 
Foster,  Charles  J.,  99,  218,  219,  221,  285, 286, 487, 

511,  555. 

Foundation  Stock  of  England,  68-72,  106. 
Foundation  Saddle  Stock,  194.  195. 
Founders  of  Trotting  Families,  274. 
France,  Early  Horses  of,  143. 
France,  William  C.,  501,  505. 
Frank,  442. 

Franklin,  Benjamin,  136. 
Frauds  in  Early  Pedigrees,  96-97,  100, 101. 
Fred  Crocker,  292,  293. 
Frolic,  334. 


Gades  (Cadiz),  44. 

Gage,  D.  M.,  306. 

Gaits  of  Saddle  Horses,  192, 193,  194. 

Gaits,  Mechanism  of,  154-156,  184,  185-186. 

Gait,  The  Ambling,  157,  158,  159,  160,  161,  162. 

163, 192. 

Gaits  of  Colonial  Horses,  116,  131. 
Gait,  The  Pacing,  157-163. 
Gallatin,  451. 
Gallowav,  Samuel.  74. 
Galloway,  R.  F.,  307. 
"Galloways"  in  Virginia,  113. 
Galloway  Breed,  84.  85.  91,  163,  164,  176. 
Gambetta  Wilkes,  288. 

Gameness,  Trotter  and  Runner,  482,  489,  491. 
Gano,  318. 
Gavin,  Joseph,  414. 
General  Benton,  438. 
General  Butler,  286. 
General  Knox,  265,  309,  502. 
General  McClellan.  363. 
General  Taylor,  349. 
Gentry,  John  R.,  17. 
George  B.  McClellan,  363. 
George  M.  Patchen,  274,  329,  331,  339. 
George  M.  Patchen,  History  of,  333-336. 
George  M.  Patchen,  Jr.,  302.  335-336. 


566 


INDEX. 


George  Wilkes,  275,  308. 
George  Wilkes,  History  of,  284-289. 
George  Wilkes,  Pedigree  of,  453. 
George  Wilkes1  Sons,  Table  of,  288. 

Gibson's  Tom  Hal,  339,  360. 

Gideon,  357. 

Gilbert,  James,  453. 

Gilmore,  David  W..  328. 

Gilmore,  Frank,  328. 

Gimcrack,  447. 

Gipsey  Queen,  432,  433,  434. 

Glasgow  and  Heinsohn,  342. 

Glencoe  (imported),  432. 

Gleucoe  Chief,  306. 

Glen  view  Farm,  501,  505. 

Gloster,  302. 

Godfrey  Patchen,  336. 

Godwin,  Joseph  H.,  332,  333. 

Godolphin  Arabian,  8,  58,  59,  60, 70,  71, 73-78, 84, 
106,  353,  402,  411,  412. 

Godolphin  Arabian,  History  of,  72-78. 

Godolphin  Arabian,  Pictures  of,  73-78. 

Godolphin,  Lord,  70,  73,  74,  77,  78. 

Gog  Magog  (Estate),  70,  73,  76,  77. 

Golden  Farmer,  402. 

Goldsmith,  Alden,  286,  301,  302,  303,  304. 

Goldsmith  Maid,  308,  358,  477.  502. 

Gomer,  28,  29,  32. 

Gooding's  Champion.    (See  Champion.) 

Gooding,  T.  W.  &  W.,  346. 

Goodspeed,  H.  C.,  557. 

Goodwin  Watson  (Strathmore),  309. 

Gordon,  Gen.  John  G.,  475. 

Gould,  Ebenezer,  236. 

Gould,  Jay,  308. 

Gould,  Levi  S.,  440,  442,  444,  555. 

Governor  Nicolls  Establishes  Racing,  90. 

Governor  Sprague,  History  of,  312-314. 

Grace  Darling,  363. 

Grand  Bashaw,  321. 

Grandsons  of  Hambletonian,  284-314. 

Grand  Sultan,  321. 

Grant's  (General)  Arabs,  64. 

Grant,  Mr.,  349. 

Gray,  Angereau.  416. 

Gray,  William,  359. 

Gray's  Tom  Hal,  359. 

Great  Table  of  Trotters,  542,  551,  558,  559. 

Great  Table  of  Trotting  Families,  274. 

Green,  A.  C.,  308. 

Greene,  E.  J.,  364. 

Green,  Joseph  A.,  282, 283. 

Greene,  Judge  W.  E.,  364. 

Green,  Roger,  Pioneer  of  North  Carolina,  139. 

Green's  Bashaw.    (See  Bashaw.) 

Green   Mountain    Maid  (by  Harris'  Hamble- 
tonian), 264,  325. 

Green  Mountain  Maid,  289,  290,  355,  413. 

Gretchen  (by  Gideon),  357. 

Grey  Eagle  (Chenery^),  452. 

Grey  Eagle  Mare,  439,  440,  441,  442,  444. 

Grey  Figure,  253. 

Grey  Harry,  237. 

Greyhound,  68. 

Grey  Mambrino,  248. 

Grlnnell,  William  R.,  259,  345. 

Grinnell's  Champion.    (See  Champion.) 

Griswold,  Judge,  368. 

Griswold,  Manley,  437. 

Grosvenor,  Lord,  207,  214,  215,  216. 

Growth  of  2:30  List,  477. 

Gue,  Gurney  C.,  557. 

Gunn,  General,  246. 

Guy  Miller,  285,  288,  307. 

H 

Hackney,  The  English,  398,  400-408. 
Hackney  Stud-Book,  169,  209,  402,  404. 
Haggin,  J.  B.,  335. 
JHaic  (Haicus),  3,  29,  32. 


Haight,  Daniel  B.,  250,  260. 
Haight,  Nelson,  260. 
Halcorn  (Peters'),  195. 
Hall,  George  C.,  308. 
Hall,  Joseph,  334. 
Halstead,  Messrs.,  335. 
•Hambletonian  (Bishop's),  20,  21,  232,  235,  251, 

262,  265,  267,  306,  487. 
Hambletonian   (Bishop's)  Stud  Services,  234, 

235. 
Hambletonian  (Harris'),  20,  150,  235,  261,  309, 

348,  437. 

Hambletonian  (10),  History  of,  267-283. 
Hambletonian  Speed  and  Training,  271,  272. 
Hambletonian  (10),  20,  21,  258,  303,  309,  310,  311, 

312,  313,  314,  323-329,  398,  399,  453,  459. 
Hambletonian  (Green's),  301 . 
Hambletonian  Jr.,  302. 
Hambletonian  (Andrus'),  265, 306. 
Hambletonian's  Sons  and  Grandsons,  284-314. 
Hambletonian's  Sons  (table),  275. 
Hambletonian  (Wood's),  297. 
Hambletonian  (Judson's),  235,  265,  306. 
Hambletonian  (Parris').  265. 
Hambletonian  (Sprague's),  313. 
Hamlin,  C.  J.,  501. 
Hanchett  Horse,  264. 
Hancock,  Joseph,  322,  323. 
Hanley,  Moses,  365. 
Hanley,  Samuel,  365. 
Hanley's  Hiatoga.    (See  Hiatoga.) 
Hannibal's  Cavalry,  45,  47. 
Haphazard,  397. 

Happy  Medium,  243,  266,  275,  306. 
Harbinger,  299. 
Harding,  General,  486. 

"  Hark  Comstock"  (Peter  C.  Kellogg),  267,  555. 
Harkness,  James,  345. 
Harmor,  Mr.,  Colonial  Writer,  109. 
Harold,  History  of,  275,  305. 
Harris,  Charles  T.,  557. 
Harris,  S.  T.,  555. 

Harris'  Hambletonian.    (See  Hambletonian.) 
Harris,  Russell,  263. 
Harrison,  Benjamin,  111. 
Harry  Clay,  289,  332,  413. 
Harry  Wilkes  (Conn's),  313. 
Hartford,  First  Settlement,  13, 132. 
Harvey,  Dr.  Elwood,  111. 
Haselton,  William,  249. 
Hattie  Woodward,  312. 
Havoc,  343,  417. 
Hawkins,  Jonathan,  303. 
Hayward,  Alvan,  238,  239,  240. 
Hazard,  I.  T.,  174,  175,  177,  178,  181. 
Hazard,  Robert,  174. 
Head'em,  334. 
Helena,  294. 
Helm,  H.  T.,  302,  555. 
Helmsley  Turk,  68. 

Hempstead  Plains  Race  Course,  12,  90,  122. 
Hendrick,  Rev.  T.  A.,  557. 
Hendrickson,  William,  335. 
Hendryx,  H.  J.,  310. 
Henry,  338,  449,  450. 
Henry  Clay,  285,  336,  454,  455. 
Henry  Clay,  History  of,  327-330. 
Henry  Clay  Jr.,  329. 
Henry  Hal,  360. 
Henry,  Mason,  319. 
Henry  B.  Patchen,  336. 
Henry  VIII. ,  Law  of,  81. 
Heredity,  461. 
Heredity  of  Acquired  Habits  and  Instincts, 

Heredity  of  Bad  Qualities,  478. 
Heredity  of  Influence,  465. 
Herbert,  Henry,  476. 
Hero,  235,  355,  437. 
Heroine,  301. 


IKDEX. 


567 


Herr,  Dr.  Levi,  316,  318,  319,  333,  417. 

HerscheU,  300. 

Hetzel,  Joseph,  301. 

]  i  iatoga  ("  Old  Togue"),  365. 

Hiatoga  (Rice's),  364. 

Hiatoga  iHanley's),  365. 

Hiatoga  (Scott's),  365. 

Itiatt.  James  M.,  557. 

Hibbard,  D.  B.,  347. 

Higbee  Brothers,  313. 

High  Asia  Not  Original  Habitat  of  Horse,  24. 

Highland  Farm,  501. 

Highland  Maid,  477-498. 

Highland  Messenger  (Wamock's),  362. 

Highlander  (Watkin's),  360,  361. 

Hill,  David,  377,  382,  383. 

Hill's  Black  Hawk.    (See  Black  Hawk.) 

Hinda  Rose,  292. 

'•  Hiram,"  437. 

Hiram  Drew,  364. 

Hiram,  King  of  Tyre,  35,  41,  48. 

History,  Colonial  Horse,  108-141. 

History  of  Abdallah,  255-201  . 

History  of  Alexander's  Abdallah,  294. 

History  of  Almont,  297. 

History  of  Andrew  Jackson,  323-325. 

History  of  Imported  Bellfounder,  397-400. 

History  of  Belmont,  299. 

History  of  Black  Hawk.  377-381. 

History  of  Cassius  M.  Clay,  330-332. 

History  of  Daniel  Lambert,  389. 

History  of  Dictator,  303. 

History  of  Electioneer,  289-294. 

History  of  Ethan  Allen,  381-389. 

History  of  George  M.  Patchen,  333-335. 

History  of  George  Wilkes,  284-289. 

History  of  Governor  Sprague,  312-314. 

History  of  Hambletoman  (10),  267-283. 

History  of  Happy  Medium,  306. 

History  of  Harold,  305. 

History  of  Henry  Clay.  327-330. 

History  of  Jay  Gould,  307-309. 

History  of  Justin  Morgan,  367-376. 

History  of  Kemble  Jackson,  325-327. 

History  of  Long  Island  Black  Hawk,  327. 

History  of  Mambrino  Chief,  315-317. 

History  of  Messenger,  222-231. 

History  of  the  Orloff  Trotter,  390-397. 

History  of  the  Pacing  Horse,  154-171. 

History  of  Pilot  Jr.,  343,  344. 

History  of  the  Standard,  518-524. 

History  of  Strathmore,  309. 

History  of  Tippo,  145-147. 

History  of  Volunteer,  301. 

History  of  Wallace's  Monthly,  554-557. 

History  of  the  Wallace  Publications,  547-559. 

Hoagland,  Sim  D.,  264. 

Hobbie,  The  Irish,  80,  85,  113,  160,  161,  163. 

Hobgoblin,  70. 

Holbert  Colt,  311. 

Holcomb,  Joel  W.,  382,  383. 

Holstein,  Otto,  557. 

Holton,  John  A.,  421-431. 

Holton,  Llewellyn,  421.  423,  424,  426,  428,  429, 

430,  431. 

Honest  Ance,  349. 
Honest  John,  325. 
Honesty,  307. 
Honey  wood  Arabian,  69. 
Hook,  Thomas.  319. 
Hooker,  Rev.  Thomas,  131. 
Hoosier  Tom,  359. 
Hoover,  Jonas,  327. 


Hopkins,  George,  437. 
Hopples,  157,  473. 


Hopson,  Seth  P.,  260. 

Horse  Advertisement,  First  American,  130. 

Horseman,  The,  557. 

Horse  Portraiture,  Improvement  in,  556. 

Horse  Racing,  First  in  Virginia,  109,  110,  113. 


"  Horse  Review,  The,"  414,  557. 

Hotspur,  253. 

Houghton  Hall,  Norfolk,  Eng.,  76,  77. 

How  the  Trotting  Horse  is  Bred,  456,  460. 

Howard,  Rev.  Erastus,  146,  148,  149. 

Howard,  James,  94. 

Howard,   Sanford,   on  Winthrop   Messenger, 

238,  239. 

Hoyt,  Hezekiah,  294,  295. 
Hoyt,  James  W.,  414. 
Hudson,  Henry,  Explorer,  120. 
Huggins,  Dr.,  474. 
Hulda,  288. 
Hulse  Mare,  301. 
Hunt,  Benjamin  W.,  557. 
Hunt,  John  W.,  258. 
Hunt's  Eagle,  326. 
Hunter  Mare,  357. 
Huntress,  302, 
Husted,  Jacob,  251. 
Hutchinson,  Mathias,  253. 
Huxley,  Professor,  on  Primal  Horse,  197. 
Hyksos.    (See  Shepherd  Kings.) 

I 

Iberi  and  Celtee  (Spanish  tribes),  46. 

Idol,  502. 

Importation  of  Messenger,  223. 

Importations,  Early,  220. 

Importations.  First,  8-16. 

Importations,  First  to  Virginia,  109,  110,  116, 

Importations  of  Race  Horses,  117,  118. 

Importations  of  Thoroughbreds,  First,  95,  96. 

Impetuous,  306. 

Independent  (Mott's),  312. 

Indiana  Belle,  432. 

Indian  Hill  Farm,  319. 

Indirect  and  Collateral  Heredity,  464. 

Infidel,  English  Trotter,  214. 

Influence  of  First  Impregnations,  465. 

Inheritance,  Laws  of,  462,  463. 

Instincts  and  Characters,  Acquired,  471. 

Investigating  Pedigrees,  22. 

Investigation  of  Disputed  Pedigrees,  409-455. 

lola,  261,  325. 

Irish  Hobbies,  160,  161,  163,  164. 

Irons,  John,  354. 

Irons'  Cadmus.    (See  Cadmus.) 

Isaiah  Wilcox  Mare,  266. 

Itasca,  334. 


Jackson,  Josiah,  278,  281. 

Jackson,  Tim  T.,  302,  330. 

Jackson,  Thomas,  247. 

Jackson,  Thomas,  Jr.,  241. 

James  I.  King,  7,  70,  163,  167. 

Janus  (Imported),  95,  243. 

Japheth,  3. 

Jaques,  Samuel,  Jr.,  397,  398. 

Jay  Bird,  288. 

Jay  Gould,  History  of,  275,  307-309. 

Jay  Gould's  dam,  503,  504. 

Jefferson,  President,  64,  111. 

Jeffries,  Daniel,  323,  324. 

Jenkinson,  Thomas,  402. 

Jennet,  The  Spanish,  160, 161, 174, 175. 

Jenny  Duter,  253. 

Jenny  Lind,  327. 

Jerome  Eddy,  303. 

Jersey  Fagdown,  252,  325. 

Jersey  Highlander,  417. 

Jersey  Kate,  330,  336. 

Jersey  Wilkes,  288. 

Jewett,  H.  C.,  501. 

Jigg,  211. 

Jim  Munro,  297. 

"J.  M.."  270. 

Job,  the  Patriarch,  39,  40. 


568 


INDEX. 


John  Anderson,  330. 

John  Dillard,  195. 

John  Hal,  360. 

John  Netherland,  360. 

John  Stewart,  482. 

Johnson,  Dick,  84,  418,  441. 

Johnston,  Mr.,  150. 

Jolly  Roger  (Imported),  96. 

Jones,  Hugh,  Colonial  Writer,  112. 

Jones,  Major  William,  236,  246,  247,  256. 

Jones,  David  W.,  226,  236,  237,  241,  247,  252,  256. 

Jones,  Gilbert,  260. 

Jones,  Peter  W.,  328. 

Jones,  Richard  B.,  321. 

Joseph  (Patriarch),  29,  36,  38,  41,  43. 

Joseph,  John,  365. 

Joshua,  40. 

Judge  Brigham  (Jay  Gould),  308. 

Judge  Fullerton,  308. 

Judith,  357. 

Judson,  Dr.  Nathan,  265. 

Julia  Johnson,  359. 

Juliet  (by  Pilot  Jr.),  319. 

Julius  Caesar's  Invasion  of  Britain,  157. 

Justin  Morgan,  367-376. 

K 

Kate  (by  Pilot  Jr.),  297, 298. 

Katy  Darling,  294,  295. 

Katty  war  Horses  of  India,  468. 

Kellogg,  Peter  C.,  267,  269,  511,  555. 

Kellogg,  Mr.  (Battle  Creek),  345. 

Kelly,  Benjamin,  377-379. 

Kelly,  John  L.,  379. 

Kemble  Jackson,  History  of,  325-327,  331. 

Kemble  Jackson  Check,  326. 

Kennebec  Messenger,  238. 

Kent,  Charles,  281. 

Kent  &  Bailey,  455. 

Kent  Mare,  History  of,  267,  276,  277,  399. 

Kentucky  Hunter,  360,  361,  498. 

Kentucky  Hunter.    (See  Shenandoah.) 

Kentucky  Methods,  Early,  511,  512,  534,  535. 

Kentucky  Stud-Book.  (See  Breeders1  Trotting 
Stud-Book.) 

Kentucky  Standard,  The,  524,  525,  526,  527,  528. 

Kentucky  Trotting  Pedigrees,  Early,  516.  517. 

Kentucky  Union,  312. 

Keokuk,  418. 

Kerner,  Charles  H.,  308. 

King  Almont,  299. 

King,  David,  345. 

King  James  Arabian.  (See  Markham  Ara- 
bian.) 

King  Pharaoh,  341. 

King  Rene,  300. 

Kings  of  Armenia,  29. 

King's  Champion.    (See  Champion.) 

Kirk,  Jacob,  253. 

Kissam,  B.  T.,256. 

Kissam,  T.  T.,  256,  398,  399. 

Kittredge,  Herbert  S.,  Artist,  291,  294,  556. 

Kittrell,  M.  B.,  359. 

Kittrell's  Tom  Hal,  359. 

Koontz,  John  A.,  on  the  Wild  Horse,  200. 

Kosciusko,  319. 

Kremlin,  306. 


Lady  Alport,  399. 
Lady  Balch,  357. 
Lady  Clinton,  339. 
Lady  Fulton,  482. 
Lady  Irwin,  311. 
Lady  Jane,  363. 
Lady  McClain,  400. 
Lady  Maud,  502. 
Lady  Moscow,  349. 
Lady  Moore,  261. 
Lady  Patriot,  301. 


Lady  Sanford,  308. 

Lady  Shannon,  264. 

Lady  Suffolk,  243,  251,  344,  861,  377,  477. 

Lady  Surrey,  327. 

Lady  Thorn,  286,  308,  317,  318,  319,  399,  502. 

Lady  Vernon,  325. 

Lady  Waltermire,  309,  313. 

Lady  Warrenton,  325. 

Lady  Webber,  400. 

Ladd,  Mr.,  312. 

Lakeland  Abdallah,  305. 

Land  of  Uz,  40. 

Lander,  Gen.  F.  W.,  363. 

Lantern,  437. 

Lark.    (See  Charley  B.) 

Last  Pacers  in  Britain,  410. 

Lath,  70,  84,  163. 

Laurence's  Eclipse,  332. 

Lawrence,  John,  157,  159,  165, 170,  209,  211,  212, 

214,  401.  402. 

Laws  of  Breeding,  512-514. 
Laws  that  Govern,  The,  460. 
Law  of  Heredity,  462. 

Leading  Sons  of  Alexander's  Abdallah,  297. 
Leading  Sons  of  Almont,  299. 
Leading  Sons  of  Belmont,  300. 
Leading  Sons  of  Electioneer,  293. 
Leading  Sons  of  George  Wilkes,  288. 
Leavens,  Louis  T.,  146,  147. 
Leedes'  Hobby,  85. 
Leonard,  John,  359. 
Leviathan,  451. 
Lewis,  Enoch,  177,  178. 
Lewis,  Joseph  S.,  453,  454. 
Lewis,  Mr.,  112. 
Lexington,  413,  439,  440,  441,  442,  443,  444,  445,. 

446,  451,  479,  488. 
Like  Begets  Like,  512,  513,  514. 
Lilly  Hitchcock,  443. 
Limber,  424,  426. 
Limber  Jack,  359. 
Lincoln,  President,  64. 
Lindsay's  Arabian,  93,  94, 132. 
Lindsay,  Captain,  94. 
Linsley,  Mr.,  368,  376. 
Little  Albert,  294. 
Little  Brown  Jug,  360. 
Little  Gipsey,  359. 
Lizzie  (by  John  Netherland),  360. 
Lizzie  M.,  482. 
Loder,  G.  B.,  352. 
Loder,  Lewis,  352. 
Logan,  Thomas,  322. 
Long  Island  Black  Hawk,  History  of,  282,  327, 

331 . 

Longstreet,  Dr.,  334. 
Loomis  Brothers,  361. 
Lord  Grosvenor,  448. 
Lord  Nelson,  311. 

Lord  Russell,  Pedigree  of,  420-431,  434. 
Lord  Rusself,  344,  429. 
Louis  Napoleon,  303. 
Love,  Joel  F.,  295. 
Lovejoy,  Mr.,  328. 
Lovelace,  Governor,  122. 
Lucas,  John,  358. 
Lucas,  Le  Grand,  529. 
Lucia,  309. 

Luckett,  Benjamin,  420,  421,  422,  423. 
Lucy,  286,  308,  309,  335,  502. 
Lucy  Fowler,  451,  452. 
Lula,  350.  493. 
Lula  Wilkes,  493. 
Lumps,  288. 

Luthy,  Prof.  Charles  T.,  557. 
Lynne  Belle,  294. 
Lyons,  Captain,  369. 

IVI 

McDonald,  William,  365. 


INDEX. 


569 


TlcDowell,  H.  C.,  304,  524,  526,  527,  528,  529,  531, 

533,552. 

Mace,  Dan,  286,  317,  386,  387. 
McFerran,  J.  C.,  526,  527. 
McGrath,  Price,  451. 
McKinney,  H.  D.,  557. 
McKinney,  Horace,  364. 
McKinstry  Mare,  303. 
McLaughlin,  Sam,  287. 
Macleod,  Leslie  E.,  404,  557. 
MeLoyd,  Charles,  on  the  Wild  Horse,  200. 
McNitt  Mr.,  348,  349. 

MeSparran,  Rev.  Dr.,  112, 134,  175, 176, 177,  178. 
Magog  Hills  (Estate),  73. 
Magnolia,  341. 
Magnum  Bonum,  347,  350. 
Ma- Taylor,  313. 
Maine  Messengers,  515. 

Maine  Messenger.    (See  Winthrop  Messenger.) 
Major  EdsaU,  297. 
Mali,  H.  W.  T.,  538,  539,  542. 
Mambrino,  316,  344.  399,  400,  487,  557. 
Mambrino  Chief,  20,  21,  261,  350,  418. 
Mambrino  Chief  and  His  Family,  315-320. 
Mambrino  Chief  Jr.,  318. 
Mambrino  (English),  19,  20,  213,  214,  215. 
Mambrino  (Grey),  248. 
Mambrino,  History  of,  235-237. 
Mambrino  Jr.,  261. 
Mambrino  Messenger,  261. 
Mambrino  Patchen,  318,  319. 
Mambrino  Paymaster,  20,  237,  251,  259,  261,  815. 
Mambrino  Pilot,  318,  319. 
Mambrino  Russell,  344. 
Mambritonian,  300. 
Manetho.  Egyptian  Historian,  37. 
Mannol,  26. 
Manzanita,  292. 
Maria  Russell,  420-431. 
Marion's  Guerrillas.  295,  296. 
Maritime  Provinces  (Canada),  152. 
"Mark  Field, "557. 

Markham  Arabian,  57-70,  80,  163,  167. 
Markham,  John,  57,  70,  80. 
Markham,  Gervaise,  80, 160, 161, 170,  175,  192. 
Marksman,  301. 
Marquis  of  Cholmondeley,  76. 
Marrett,  W.  H.,  557. 
Marsh's  Primal  Horse,  197. 
Marsh.  Professor,  of  Yale,  197. 
Marshall  or  Selaby  Turk,  69. 
Marshall,  Mr.,  Studmaster,  etc.,  69. 
Marshland  Shales,  403. 
Marvin.  Charles,  291,  292,  357. 
Mary  Bell,  422. 
Mary  Churchill,  422,  425. 
Mary  Gray  (Imported),  96. 
Mary  Morris,  439. 
Maryland,  15. 

Maryland,  Colonial  Horse  History,  139. 
Maryland,  Racing  Prohibited,  15, 139. 
Mason,  John  T.,  358. 
Mas|>ero,  Professor,  37,  39. 
Massachusetts,  Colonial  Horse  History,  128- 

131. 

Masterlode,  275-311. 
Mathes,  Albert,  377. 
Matthews,  W.  A.,  335. 
Matlock,  T.,  179. 
Mattie  Howard,  482. 
Maud  S..  300,  305,  457,  458,  477,  487,  499. 
Maud  S.,  Pedigree  of,  420-431. 
May  Day  (by  Miles  Standish),  356. 
May  Fly,  311. 
May  Morning,  355. 
May  Queen,  350,  356. 
Meander,  300. 
Mecklenburg  Horses.  391. 
Media.  2.  30,  32. 
Median  Horses,  29,  30,  33,  34. 


Medoc,  449. 

Merring.  Mr.,  352. 

Messenger  (Imported),  History  of,  222-231. 

Messenger  and  His  Ancestors,  205-221. 

Messenger's  Descendants,  255. 

Messenger,  Description  of,  226,  227. 

Messenger  as  a  Race-Horse.  222. 

Messenger's  Stud  Services,  229,  230, 

Messenger's  Sons,  232-254. 

Messenger,  (Imported),   Reference  to,  18,  19, 

316,  323,  327,  332,  338,  344,  348,  349,  357,  351, 

362,  399,  417,  457,  459. 
"  Messenger,"  (the  name  abused),  254. 
Messenger  (Austin's),  249. 
Messenger  (Blauvelt's),  250. 
Messenger  (Bush's),  History  of,  243-245. 
3Iessenger  (Coffin's),  261. 
Messenger  (Cooper's),  253. 
Messenger  (Cousins'),  250. 
Messenger  (Hutchinson's).  253. 
Messenger  (Nesthall's),  146. 
Messenger  (Ogden's),  361. 
Messenger  (Pizzant's),  249. 
Messenger  (Simpson's),  364. 
Messenger  (Stone's),  364. 

Messenger's  Runningbred  Contemporaries,  28J) 
Messenger  Duroc,  275-289. 
Messenger  Duroc  (Backman's),  310,  311. 
Messenger  Duroc  (Durland's),  414. 
Messenger  Duroc  (Laurence's),  308. 
Messenger  Duroc  (Stevens'),  315. 
Middletown,  275. 
Miland,  Colonel,  243. 
Miller,  Guy,  270.  414. 
Miller.  James.  295. 
Miller's  Damsel,  233,  246,  248, 251. 
Millington,  Dr.,  244. 
Mills,  James  M.,  311.  349. 
Mills,  Joseph  T.,  348. 
Minchin,  John,  308. 
Mingo,  339. 
Minor  Families,  21. 
Miss  Hervey,  397. 
Miss  McLeod,  311. 
Miss  Russell,  299.  300,  344,  420,  431.  ' 
Miss  Shepherd,  423. 
Mittendorf,  Prof.  Von,  393. 
Modesty,  264. 
Mohammed,  4. 
Mohammed,  Flight  from  Mecca,  etc.,  53, 54,  55, 

56,  57. 

Mohammed's  Mares,  54. 
Mohammedanism  in  Northern  Africa,  47. 
Mohawk,  327. 
Monaco.  300. 
Monkey  (Imported).  95. 
Monroe,  "Jim,"  295. 
Montaigne,  465. 
Moore,  Hon.  Ely,  326. 
Moore,  R.  H..  360. 
Moore,  T.  D.,  359. 
Moors,  46. 

Mordeu,  Isaac,  146.  147,  149. 
Morgan  Family.  366-389. 
Morgan  Horse,  The,  482,  515. 
Morgan  Tiger,  265. 
Morgan,  Abner,  367. 
Morgan,  John,  372. 
Morgan,  John.  Jr.,  367,  369. 
Morgan,  Mr.,  321. 
Morris,  Lewis,  235,  236. 
Morris  Family.  Turfmen,  125. 
Morris,  George  F..  Artist,  556. 
Morrissey,  John,  286,  388. 
Morse.  Calvin.  349. 
Morse  Horse  (Norman),  348,  350,  378, 
Morton,  Earl  of,  465.  466,  467,  468. 
Mound  Builders.  199. 
Mount  Ararat,  28,  32. 
Mount  Holly,  250. 


570 


INDEX. 


Mozza,  348. 

Muley,  Ishmael,  King  of  Morocco,  69. 

Munger,  Frank.    (See  Royal  George.) 

Hunger,  William,  364. 

Munson,  Isaac,  262,  263,  264. 

Munson  Mare.  235. 

Muir,  William.  Historian,  53. 

Murray,  Dr.  J.  H.,  74. 

Murrier,  D.,  English  Artist,  77,  78. 

Music's  Dam,  502. 

Mustang,  The,  204. 

IM 

Nancy,  355. 

Nancy  Dawson.  361. 

Nancy  Hanks,  247,  307. 

Nancy  Pope,  342,  343,  417. 

Nancy  Taylor,  342,  343.  417. 

Narragansett  Pacers,  12,  13,  14,  126,  127,  133, 
134,  173-182. 

National  Association  of  Trotting  Horse  Breed- 
ers, 517,  518,  519,  520.  527,  552,  553,  554. 

National  Horse  Show,  406,  407,  408. 

National  Trotting  Association,  533, 534. 

Native  British  Horses,  164,  165,  166. 

Native  English  Race  Horses,  82,  86,  96, 105, 106. 

"  Natural  History  of  Man,"  472. 

Neapolitan  Horses,  81-168. 

Nelson,  357. 

Nelson,  C.  H.,  357. 

Nestor,  250. 

Nettie  Burlew,  346. 

New  Amsterdam  (New  York),  122. 

New  Brunswick,  153. 

Newcastle,  Duke  of,  57,  58,  70,  80,  81,  87,  92,  162, 
167,  170. 

New  England,  Colonial  Horse  History,  12,  128- 
134. 

New  Jersey,  Colonial  Horse  History,  138,  139. 

New  Jersey,  Racing  Prohibited,  14,  15. 

Newmarket,  The  American,  90,  91,  122. 

New  Netherlands,  11. 

New  York,  Colonial  Horse  History,  120-127. 

New  York,  First  Horses  of,  120,  121,  123. 

New  York  the  Source  of  Supply  of  Trotting 
Blood,  515. 

Nicolls,  Governor,  Establishes  Racing,  12,  122. 

Nichols,  Mr.,  474. 

Night  Hawk,  347. 

Niles,  Stephen,  148, 149. 

Nissaeum,  Horses  of,  30,  34,  50. 

Noble,  Henry  D.,  262. 

Nonpareil,  327. 

Norfolk  Trotters,  76,  169,  398,  400. 

Norlaine,  292. 

Norman  (Alexander's),  350,  417,  418. 

Norman  Family,  348-351. 

Norman.    (See  Morse  Horse.) 

Norseman,  79. 

North  American,  309,  312,  313. 

North  Carolina,  Colonial  Horse  History,  139. 
140. 

Northern  Africans,  46,  47. 

"  Northern  Kings,"  Horses  of,  29,  30. 

Northern  Syria,  38,  39. 

Norton,  Selah,  369,  370,  371,  375. 

Norval,  293,  294. 

Nova  Scotia,  153. 

Norwegian  Horses,  165,  473. 

Nubian  Horses,  31. 

Numidian  Cavalry,  Hannibal's,  45. 

Nutwood,  298,  300,  344,  493. 

Nutwood,  Pedigree  of,  420-481. 


O'Blennis,  325. 
Odom,  Eli,  451,  452. 
Ogden,  Judge.  David,  247,  248. 
Ogden  Messenger,  247. 
Ohio  Farmer,  352. 


Old  Columbus,  151. 

Old  Drew.    (See  Drew  Horse.) 

"  Old  Duroc,"  437. 

Old  Jane,  346. 

"  Old  Keokuk."   (See  Keokuk.) 

Old  March,  360. 

"  Old  Narragansett,"  498. 

Old  Pilot.    (See  Pacing  Pilot.) 

Old  St.  Lawrence,  151. 

Old  Shales.    (See  Shales.) 

Old  Sorrel.  308. 

"  Old  "  Spirit  of  the  Times,  99-101. 

Old  Telegraph,  454,  455. 

Old  Theories  of  Breeding,  510. 

Old  Togue.    (See  Hiatoga.) 

"Old  Turfman"  (C.  R.  Colden),  98. 

Oliver,  Joseph,  330,  331. 

Oliver,  Judge  M.  ,W.,  557. 

One  Eye,  21,  235.  267,  277,  278,  281,  399. 

Oneida  Chief,  361. 

Oneness  of  Trotting  and  Pacing  Gaits,  498, 499. 

Oneness  of  Trot  and  Pace,  155, 156, 184, 185, 186. 

Onward,  288. 

Origin  of  American  Race  Horse,  92, 96, 105,  106. 

Originjof  English  Race  Horse,  86-92,  105,  106. 

Origin  and  History  of  the  Standard,  518-524. 

Original  Habitat  of  the  Horse,  2,  24-35. 

Orloff,  Count  Alexis,  391,  395. 

Orloff  Trotter,  The,  390-397. 

Orser,  Sheriff,  328. 

Osborne,  Lord  Francis  Godolphin,  76. 

Ott,  Almeron,  346. 

"O.  W.  C.,"  557. 


Pace,  The,  161-189. 

Pace  and  Trot,  Varieties  of  One-Gait,  155,  156r 

184,  185,  186. 

Pacer  of  Canada,  142,  143,  151,  152,  153. 
Pacer,  The,  in  Relation  to  Trotter,  172-189. 
Pacers  in  Colonial  Period,  14,  116,  126,  118,  137. 
Pacers,  Early  American,  112,  126,  127,  181,  132r 

133,  134,  138,  139,  141. 
Pacers,  English,  84,  85,  86,  157-171. 
Pacers,  Last  in  Britain,  410. 
Pacers  of  Rhode  Island,  173-182. 
Pacers  in  Russia,  392,  393,  394. 
Pacing  Ancestry  of  Saddle  Horse,  191. 
Pacing  Gaits,  Mechanism  of,  154-156,  184,  185r 

186. 
Pacing  Horse,  History  and  Antiquity  of,  154- 

Pacing  Pilot,  152,  195,  299,  316,  343,  416,  417. 

Pacing  Pilot.  History  of,  341-343. 

Pacing  and  Trotting,  Oneness  of,  17,  498,  499. 

Packer,  L.  D.,  536,  539,  542. 

Paddy,  377. 

Palgrave,  Historian.  52. 

Palo  Alto  Farm,  289,  291,  293,  294,  491,  492,  501,. 

503,  504,  505. 
Parris  Horse,  265. 
Parthenon  at  Athens,  Frieze  of,  16,  156. 


Patchen,  George  M.,  329,  331. 

Paul,  290. 

Paul  Pry,  250,  251. 

Peabody,  Warren,  295. 

Peacock,  348,  349. 

Pearce,  Edmund,  342. 

Pearl,  322. 

Pease,  Mark,  363. 

Peck,  Harvey  W.,  557. 

Pedigree  of  American  Eclipse,  446. 

Pedigree  of  Alexander's  Norman,  417. 

Pedigree  of  Bay  Chief,  418. 

Pedigree  of  Black  Rose,  419. 

Pedigree  of  George  Wilkes,  454. 

Pedigree  of  Hambletonian,  267. 

Pedigree  of  Lord  Russell,  420-431. 

Pedigree  of  Maud  S.,  420-431. 


INDEX. 


571 


Pedigree  of  Messenger,  205-221. 

Pedigree  of  Miss  Russell,  420-431. 

Pedigree  of  Nutwood,  420-481. 

Pedigree  of  Pilot  Jr.,  416,  417. 

Pedigree  of  Sally  Russell,  420-431. 

Pedigree  of  Sunol,  438-446. 

Pedigree  of  Tippoo,  145-147. 

Pedigree  of  Waxana,  438-446. 

Pedigrees,  Early  Fictions,  8. 

Pedigrees,  Early  Frauds  in,  96,  97,  100,  101. 

Pedigrees,  Investigation  of,  22,  409-455. 

Pelham.  498. 

Penn,  William,  Arrival  of,  14,  135. 

Pennsylvania,  Colonial  Horse  History,  135-138. 

Pepper,  Col.  R.  P.,  397,  421. 

Perkins,  Mark  D.,  328. 

Perry,  Alvah,  365. 

Persian  Horses,  49,  50,  391,  468. 

Pet.  325. 

Peyton.  Balie,  486. 

Pfifer,  Dan,  335. 

Phallas,  305. 

Phallamont,  305. 

Pheasant,  232. 

Phidias,  Greek  Sculptor,  16,  156. 

Philadelphia.  Early  Pacing  at,  179. 

Philips,  Clark,  454,  455. 

Philips,  E.  V.,  454. 

Philips,  Josiah,  453. 

Philistorgius.  27,  39,  42,  95. 

Phoenicia.    (See  Phoenician  Merchants.) 

Phoenician  Merchants,  4,  33,  35,  38,  39,  40-48, 
79,  185. 

Photius,  Early  Writer,  27,  42. 

Pick's  Turf  Register,  83,  84,  214,  215,  216. 

Pictures  of  Horses,  First  Correct,  556. 

Piedmont.  299. 

Pierce,  Abraham,  356. 

Pilot  Family,  343,  344. 

Pilot  Jr.,  274,  309,  316,  416,  417,  458,  463. 

Pilot,  Pacing,  195. 

"  Pinafore  Standard."  (See  Kentucky  Stand- 
ard.) 

Pixley,  309. 

Place's  White  Turk.  68. 

Plato,  251. 

Plow  Boy,  327. 

Plutarch,  465. 

Pocahontas,  355-358,  414. 

Pocahontas  (Young),  355. 

Polk  Brothers,  359. 

Polkan  (Volcan),  392. 

Polonius,  311. 

Polybius,  Historian,  45. 

Polydore  Virgil,  165, 170. 

Pope  Mare,  297. 

Porter  Colt.    (See  Daniel  Lambert.) 

Porter,  John,  389. 

Porter,  Judge  J.,  245. 

Porter's  Spirit  of  the  Times,  99. 

Porter,  William  T.,  98,  99,  235,  259,  344,  437. 

Portia,  493. 

Port  Royal,  N.  S.,  Raid  on,  142. 

Portraits  of  Horses,  First  Correct,  556. 

PotSos,  447. 

Potomac  (by  Messenger),  245. 

Pray  Colt,  279. 

Pray,  Ebenezer,  278,  280. 

Pratt,  John,  216,  222,  223. 

Primal  Horse,  The,  18,  195-197. 

Prince,  437. 

Prince  Edward  Island,  153. 

Prince  of  Wales'  Arabian  Horses,  60. 

Princeps,  319. 

Princess,  235,  243,  266,  306,  307. 

Pritchard,  Dr.,  472. 

'•Privateer,"  555. 

Prophet's  Mares,  The,  54,  55,  56. 

Pruden,  James,  353. 

Purchas,  Samuel,  166. 


Puett,  Mr.,  435. 

Purposes  of  Kentucky  Standard,  524,  525,  526. 


Story,  465. 
juaker  Lass,  253. 
Juarter  Racing,  Colonial,  115. 
)ueen  Ann,  243. 
Jueen  Mary,  528,  552. 
Jueen  of  Sheba,  Visit  to  Solomon,  40,  42. 
leen  (dam  of  Blue  Bull),  353. 
'  iby,  David,  364. 


Race  Horse,  The  American,  90-107. 

Race  Horse,  The  English,  67-89. 

Race  Horses,  Native  American,  96. 

Races,  Early  Colonial  Pacing,  177,  178. 

Racing  in  America,  Antiquity  of,  90,  91.  | 

Racing  in  England,  Early,  83. 

Racing,  First,  iu  America,  122,  123,  124,  125,  126, 

134. 

Racing,  First  Established  American,  12. 
Racing,  First,  in  Virginia,  109,  110,  113. 
Racing  Prohibited  in  Maryland,  138,  139. 
Racing  Prohibited  in  New  Jersey,  138. 
Racing  Prohibited  in  Pennsylvania,  136. 
Racing  Register,  Bailey's  English,  83. 
Rack,  The,  192. 
Ralph  Wilkes,  288. 
Randolph,  John,  450. 
Ranger  (Lindsay's  Arabian),  94. 
Rattler,  157,  420,  422,  473. 
Raudenbush,  George  W.,310. 
Ray,  John  P.,  454.  455,  557. 
Raynor  Colt,  259. 344. 
Raynor,  George,  259,  344. 
Red  Bird,  345. 
Red  Wilkes,  288. 
Reeder,  Dr.  George,  475. 
Regan,  Joseph,  335. 
Register  Association,  The  American  Trotting, 

536-545. 
Regulus,  70. 

Regulus  Mare  and  Produce,  206. 
Relf,  C.  P.,  319. 

Remington  Horse,  235,  262,  264. 
Reynolds,  Edward,  244. 
Reynolds,  G.  U.,  326. 

Rhode  Island.  Colonial  Horse  History,  133, 134, 
Rhode  Island  Pacers.  173,  174,  175,  176,  177,  178» 

179,  180,  181,  182,  286,  309,  313. 
Rhode  Island  and  Virginia  Pacing  Races,  177, 

Ribot,  Th.,  466. 

Rice's  Hiatoga.    (See  Hiatoga.) 

Rice,  Edward.  364,  365. 

Richards,  A.  Keene,  6,  7,  64.  65.  66,  93. 

Richard,  John,  Publisher,  99. 

Richards,  Richard,  350. 

Ridgeway,  Benjamin  C.,  248. 

Rip  Van  Dam's  Pacer,  127,  147,  174, 179. 

Rising  Sun,  357. 

Rittenhouse,  David,  365. 

Robert  Fillingham  (George  Wilkes),  285. 

Robert  J.,  306,  309. 

Robin  Gray,  419. 

Robinson.  Governor  of  Rhode  Island,  174, 

Rockhill  &  Brother,  310. 

Rockingham  (Imported),  322. 

Rockplanter.  346. 

Roderick,  King  of  Visigoths,  46. 

Rodes,  Levi  T.,  318. 

Roe,  Seely  C.,  271,  383. 

Roebuck,  493. 

"Roland,  "557. 

Romaine,  Cyrus,  434,  435,  436. 

Romans  in  Britain,  79,  80. 

Rosalind,  502. 

Rosalind  Wilkes,  313. 


•572 


INDEX. 


Roulin,  Mops.,  472,  473. 

Rous,  Admiral,  4,  67,  71. 

Roxana,  70,  84,  163,  213. 

Royal  George,  150. 

Royal  Mares,  58,  68,  82,  84,  410. 

Ruins,  Prehistoric  American,  199. 

Running  Blood  in  the  Trotter,  481^96,  511. 

Running  Gait,  The,  154-156. 

Russell,  Capt.  John  W.,  420-431. 

Russell,  Col.  H.  S.,  357. 

Russell,  Mr.,  350. 

Russian  Pacers,  392,  393,  394. 

Ry lander,  Mr.,  238. 

Rynders,  Capt.  Isaiah,  311,  414. 

Rysdyk,  Wm.  M.,  272,  278,  281,  302,  309,  398,  399. 


Sabaeans,  42. 

-Saddle  Gaits,  192,  193,  194. 

Saddle  Horse,  American  and  English,  119. 

Saddle  Horse,  Ancestry  of  the,  191. 

Saddle  Horse,  English,  192,  193. 

.Saddle  Horse  Register,  194. 

Saddle  Horse,  The  American,  190-195. 

Saddle  Stock,  Foundation,  194,  195. 

Sager  Horse  (Young  Sportsman),  149. 

St.  Bel,  293. 

St.  Hillaire,  Geoffrey,  472. 

St.  Julien,  302. 

St.  Lawrence  (Old),  151. 

St.  Marks,  Venice,  Bronze  Horses  of,  158. 

St.  Victor's  Barb,  410. 

S  iladin,  321. 

Sale  of  Wallace  Publications,  536-545. 

Salisbury,  Monroe,  501. 

Sally  Anderson,  297. 

Sally  Miller,  325,  327,  328. 

Sally  Russell,  Pedigree  of,  420-431,  458. 

Sally  Slouch,  338. 

Sal  tram,  451. 

Sam  Hazzard,  152. 

Sam  Purdy,  335,  337. 

Sampson,  19,  209,  211,  212. 

Sanders,  James  H.,  529,  530,  531. 

Sanders'  Trotting  Stud  Book.    (See  Breeders1 

Trotting  Stud  Book.) 
Santa  Claus,  310. 
Saracenic  Horse.     (See  Arabs,  Turks,  Barbs, 

etc.) 

Saracens,  50. 

Saracens  Overthrow  Visigoths,  46. 
Saracens  in  Spain,  473. 
Saratoga,  250. 
Sarpedon,  437. 
Satterwhite,  Mr.,  441. 
Saunders,  H.  C.,  359. 
Scandinavian  Horse,  473. 
Scanlon,  James,  333. 
Scape  Goat,  147,  149. 
Scobey,  Backus  &  Burlew,  345. 
Scobey,  C.,  345. 
Scobey 's  Black  Prince,  346. 
Scobey's  Champion.    (See  Champion.) 
Scotland,  482. 
Scott,  Samuel,  365. 
Scott's  Hiatoga.    (See  Hiatoga.) 
Scott's  Shales.    (See  Shales.) 
Screwdriver,  243. 
Seagull,  422,  426. 
Sears,  Richard,  307. 
Sedan,  Mr.,  353. 
Sedley  Arabian,  70. 
Seely  Abdallah,  283. 
Seely,  Daniel,  241. 
Seely,  David  R.,  271. 
Seely,  Jonas,  Jr.,  267,  279,  282, 283. 
Seely,  Jonas,  Sr.,  278,  279.  280. 
Seely,  Ebenezer,  280,  283. 
Seely,  Edmund,  279,  338,  340. 
Seely,  Peter,  279,  399. 


Seely's  American  Star.    (See  American  Star.) 
Selaby  (or  Marshall  Turk),  69. 
Seneca  Patchen,  336. 
Sentinel,  275,  301 . 
Serls,  Wilson,  147,  148. 
Services  of  American  Star,  340. 
Services  of  Hambletonian,  272. 
Services  of  Messenger,  229-230. 
Seward,  VV.  H.,  64. 
Shaftsbury,  253. 
-Shales,  401,  402. 

Shanghai  Mary,  289,  355,  356,  413. 
Shark.  303. 
Shawhan,  John,  358. 
Shawhan's  Tom  Hal,  358. 
Shawmut,  301. 
Sheldon  V.,  146-248. 
Shepherd,  Colonel,  422. 
Shepherd,  John.  355,  357. 
Shepherd  Kings,  36,  37,  39. 
Sherman,  B.  B.,  265. 
Sherman  Morgan,  175,  376. 
Sherrill,  Louis,  360. 
Shipman,  George,  413,  414. 
' '  Ships  of  Tarshish. ' '    (See  Tarshish.) 
Shiruo,  William,  364. 
Shropshire,  Benjamin  N.,  358. 
Shropshire,  Mr.,  Jr.,  359. 
Sickles,  H.  T.,  333,  334. 
Sidon,  35. 

Silver-tail,  21,  235,  267,  279,  281. 
Simmons,  288. 

Simmons,  Wililam  L.,  286,  287,  453. 
Simmons,  Z.  E.,  285. 
Simpson,  Joseph  Cairn,  218,  219,  221,  444,  486, 

487,  511. 

Singerly,  Benjamin,  554. 
Sir  Archy,  253,  326,  451,  488. 
Sir  Charles,  343,  417. 
Sir  Henrv,  339,  363. 
Sir  Peter,  397. 
Sir  Solomon,  246,  251. 
Sir  Wallace,  272. 

Sir  Walter  (by  Hickory),  312,  313. 
Sir  William,  318. 
Size  of  Horses,  11,  12,  13,  14,  111,  113,  114,  115, 

129,  130,  131,  136,  137,  140,  168,  172,  173,  179, 

182. 

Skenandoah,  362. 
Skinner,  John  S.,  73,  97,  98,  447. 
Skinner's  Turf  Register,  etc.,  73,  76,  97,  101, 

224,  548. 
Slasher,  253. 
Slocum.  John  N.,  350. 
Smetanka,  391,  392,  395,  396. 
Smith,  Capt.  John  W.,  Pioneer,  142. 
Smith,  F.  G.,  557. 

Smith,  H.  N..  308,  501,  502,  503,  504,  505. 
Smith,  J.  F.  D.,  Colonial  Writer,  114. 
Smith,  Thomas  T.,  345. 
Smith,  William  B.,  433. 
Smuggler,  308,  357,  358. 
Snap  Dragon,  447. 
Snediker,  Isaac,  256. 
Sniff  en,  John,  344. 
Solomon,  King,  35,  40,  41,  55. 
Somers,  George,  Early  Pioneer,  109. 
Sons  of  Alexander's  Abdallah  (table),  297. 
Sons  of  Almont  (table),  299. 
Sons  of  Belmont  (table),  300. 
Sons  of  Electioneer  (table),  293. 
Sons  of  George  Wilkes  (table),  288. 
Sons  of  Hambletonian  (table),  275. 
Sons  and  Grandsons  of  Hambletonian,  284-314. 
Sons  of  Messenger,  232 
Sophonisba,  259. 
Sorrel  Dapper,  346. 

Sorrel  Tom  (Shawhan's  Tom  Hal),  358. 
South  Carolina,  Colonial  Horse  History,  140, 

141. 


INDEX. 


573 


Sovereign  (Imported),  432. 

Sozomen's  Ecclesiastical  History,  42. 

Spain,  Early  Horses,  45,  46,  47. 

Spanish  Horses,  81,  173,  174,  175,  802,  203,  204, 

376,  472,  473. 

Spanish  Jennets,  160,  161, 174, 175. 
Spaulding,  Dr.,  333. 
Speed  of  Hambletonian,  271. 
Speed,  John,  379. 

Speed  of  Narragansett  Pacers,  176. 
Sphinx,  293. 
Spirit,  344. 

Spirit  of  the  Times,  548,  551,  557. 
Spirit  of  the  Times  (Old),  98,  101. 
Spirit  of  the  Times  (Porter's),  98. 
Spirit  of  the  Times  (Wilkes'),  98,  99,  530. 
Sprague  &  Akers,  313. 
Sprague,  Hon.  Amasa,  313. 
Sprague  (Rounds1),  313. 
Squire  Talmage,  275. 
Stamboul,  297,  332. 
Stamboul  Arabian,  418. 
Stamina,  Trotter  and  Runner,  482,  489,  490. 
Standard,  First  Suggestion  of  the,  519. 
Standard,  Origin  and  History,  518-524. 
Standard,  The,  542,  544,  545,  552,  553,  554. 
Standard,    The    Kentucky.     (See    Kentucky 

Standard.) 
Standard,  The  "  Pinafore."     (See  Kentucky 

Standard.) 

Stanford,  Leland,  291,  463,  464,  492,  493,  501. 
Stanford  University,  293. 
Stanley,  Colonel,  238. 
Star  of  Catskill,  341. 
State  of  Maine,  151. 
Statue  of  Washington,  Union  Square,  331. 

Dualities  in  Trotter  and  Runner,  482, 


Stearns,  Mr.,  346. 

Steele,  Andrew,  351. 

Steele,  Solomon,  368,  373. 

Steiner,  J.  H.,  542. 

Steel,  Robert,  307. 

Steinway,  310. 

Stephanides,  William  (Fitz  Stephen),  158. 

Stevens,  Robert  L.,334. 

Stevens,  John  Austin,123. 

Stewart,  Robert,  348. 

"S.T.  H.,"555. 

Stockholder  Mare,  422. 

Stone,  Elijah,  352,  353. 

Stoner,  Col.  R.  G.,  309,  501,  505. 

Stoner,  Martin,  349. 

Stonyford  Stud,  413. 

Stout,  Mrs.  S.  L.,  501. 

Strabo,  Greek  Historian,  2,  27,  31,  33,  39,  41,  42, 

43,95. 

Strader,  R.  S.,  333. 
Strathmore,  History  of,  275,  309,  313. 
Strype,  John,  158. 
Strideaway,  355,  356. 
Stringfield,  John  K.,  428. 
"  Structural  Incongruity,"  495. 
Strumpet,  125. 

Stubbs,  English  Artist,  73,  77,  78. 
Stud  Book,  Breeders1  Trotting.    (See  Breeders' 

Trotting  Stud  Book.) 
Stud  Book,  Edgar's,  99,  100,  101,  102,  104. 
Stud  Book,  English.    (See  English  Stud  Book.) 
Stud  Book,  Sanders'.    (See  Breeders1  Trotting 

Stud  Book.) 

Stud  Book,  Wallace's,  101-104. 
Stump  (Adams'),  £59. 
Subscription  Purses,  Early,  90. 
Sultan,  297,  332. 
Sutton,  Lewis  J.,  294. 
Sun,  The,  557. 

Sunol,  Pedigree  of,  290,  292,  294,  438-446,  499. 
Surrey,  327, 328. 
Swedish  Horses,  165,  172,  473. 


Swedish  Horses  of  Pennsylvania,  137. 

Sweepstakes,  275,  312. 

Swigert,  350. 

Swigert,  Daniel,  351. 

Swigert,  Philip,  440,  442,  444,  446. 

Swiss  Boy,  422. 

Sykes,  Mr.,  362. 


Tables— Founders  of  Great  Trotting  families, 
274. 

Tables— Sons  of  Alexander's  Abdallah,  297. 

Tables— Sons  of  Almont,  299. 

Tables— Sons  of  Belmont,  300. 

Tables— Sons  of  Electioneer,  293. 

Tables— Sons  of  Hambletonian,  275. 

Tacony,  145,  149. 

Tappan,  George,  261. 

Tarshish,  Ships  of,  4,  33,  44,  49. 

Tattersall,  Mr.,  447. 

Tattler,  493,  502. 

Taylor,  G.,  on  Early  New  England  Horses,  132. 

Taylor.  Mr.,  422. 

Taylor,  Samuel,  345. 

Tefft,  Mr.,  349. 

Ten  Broeck,  R.,  437. 

Terry,  Samuel  Hough,  557. 

Texas,  195. 

"  The  American  Roadster,"  449. 

"The  Blessing,"  Voyage  of,  109. 

The  Conqueror,  305. 

The  King,  288. 

The  Moor,  297,  332. 

"  The  Perfect  Horse,"  449. 

Theopholis,  42. 

Thomas,  Colonel,  369. 

Thomas  Jefferson,  151,  433,  482. 

Thomson,  Allen  W.,  378,  380,  433,  557. 

Thome,  Edwin,  260,  302. 

Thorndale,  297. 

Thoroughbred  Blood  in  the  Trotter,  481-496, 
511. 

Thoroughbreds,  First  in  America,  95,  96. 

Thoroughbreds,  First  in  New  York,  125. 

Thoroughbred  Foundations,  511,  513. 

Thoroughbred,  The  Term,  483,  484,  485,  486,  487, 
488. 

Thoroughbred,  What  Constitutes  a,  483,  484, 
485. 

Thoulouse  Barb,  69. 

Thurston,  Benjamin,  377. 

Thutmosis  I.,  29,  36. 

Timoleon,  450,  451,  488. 

"  Tin-cup"  Records,  506. 

Tippoo  (by  Messenger),  399. 

Tippo,  Canadian  Progenitor,  145, 146,  147. 

Tippo  Saib,  246,  276,  327. 

Tippo  Sultan,  233,  234,  246. 

Titcomb  &  Waldron,  350. 

"Titmouse  Stud  Book."  (See  Breeders'  Trot- 
ting Stud  Book.) 

Togarmah,  28,  29,  32,  33. 

Togarmah,  Land  of,  49. 

Tom  Bowling,  451,  452. 

Tom  Hal,  152,  195,  433. 

Tom  Hal  Family.  358-360. 

Tom  Hal  (Gray's),  359. 

Tom  Hal  Jr.  (Gibson's),  359,  360. 

Tom  Hal  (Kittrell's).  359. 

Tom  Hal  (Lail's),  358,  359. 

Tom  Hal  (Shawhan's),  358. 

Tom  Hal  (Shropshire's),  359. 

Tom  Patchen,  336. 

Tom  Rolfe,  355,  356,  357. 

Tom  Teemer,  419. 

Tom  Thumb,  281. 

"Tom  Titmouse  Stud  Book."  (See  Breeders* 
Trotting  Stud  Book.) 

Tom  Titmouse,  Pacer,"  531,  533. 

Tone,  Richard,  333. 


574 


INDEX. 


Tone,  Thomas,  333. 

Topgallant,  237,  451. 

Torgom,  28. 

Toronto  Chief,  151,  433. 

Tracy,  Gen.  B.  F.,  553,  557. 

Training  of  Hambletonian,  271. 

Trajan,  Emperor,  43. 

Transfer  of  Wallace  Publications,  536-545. 

"Travels  Through  the  States,"  118. 

Traveler  (Imported),  95. 

Traveler  (Lloyd's),  371. 

Traveler  (Morton's),  371. 

Traveler.    (See  Beautiful  Bay.) 

Tredwell,  Alfred  M.,  302, 

Tredwell,  John,  255,  256. 

Tredwell  Mare,  250,  251. 

Trot  and  Pace,  Varieties  of  One  Gait,  155, 156, 

184,  185,  186. 

Trotter  in  Relation  to  Pacer,  172-189,  498,  499. 
Trotters  in  England,  89. 
Trotters  in  2:15  List,  Breeders  of,  501. 
Trotting  Gait,  Mechanism  of,  154-156,  184,  185, 

186 

Trotting  Horse,  How  He  is  Bred,  456. 
Trotting  Instinct,  23. 
Trotting  Races,  Early,  138. 
Trotting  Races,  First  in  America,  456,  457. 
Trotting  Register,  508,  518,  520,  522,  529,  531. 
Trotting  Register  Association,  The  American, 

536-545. 
Trotting  Register,  Enemies  Made  by,  511,  512, 

534,  535,  543,  544,  545,  559. 
Trotting  Register,  Transfer  of,  536-545. 
Trouble,  264. 

Troye,  Animal  Painter,  65. 
True  Briton.    (See  Beautiful  Bay 
True  John,  264. 
Truffle  (Imported),  419. 
Trustee  (Imported),  334,  452,  481. 
Tucker,  Joseph.  262,  263. 
Tulip  Hill  (Estate),  74. 
Turf  Mare.    (See  Messenger.) 
Turf  Papers,  Timidity  of;  510. 
Turf  Papers  Too  Numerous.  510. 
Turf  Register,  Pick's,  83,  84. 
Turk,  411. 

Turk  (Bartlett's),  346. 
Turk  (Weddel's),  346. 
Turks,  81,  82,  85,  168,  391. 
Turks  (English  Foundation  Stock),  68-72. 
Tuscarawas  Chief.    (See  Scott's  Hiatoga.) 
Tuthill,  A.  T.,  347. 
Tweed,  James  Davis,  365. 
Tweedie,  General,  43. 
Twenty-Mile  Trotters,  482. 
Twombly,  Shade,  377. 
Twombly,  Wingate,  380. 
Tyre,  4,  35. 

U 

Udell,  Colonel,  250. 
Underbill,  Judge,  265. 
Underbill,  R.  C.,  302. 
Updike,  Mr.,  Writer,  177. 
Upton,  Major,  26,  54. 
Useful  Cub,  401,  402. 
Utica,  Algeria,  44. 
Utter  Horse,  311. 
Uz,  Land  of,  40. 

V 

Vail,  Thomas  J.,  433,  434. 
Valentine,  Native  English  Runner,  80. 
Van  Buren,  President,  64. 
Van  Cortland,  A.,  332. 
Van  Cott,  W.  H.,  345. 
Vanderbilt,  Commodore,  279. 
Van  der  Donck's  Description  of  New  Nether- 
lands, 121. 
Van  Kirk,  John  S.,  347. 


Van  Raust,  C.  W.,  224,  229.  246. 

Vanvliet,  Daniel,  437. 

Van  Wyck,  Z.  B.,  330. 

Vatican,  300. 

Veech^  R.  S.,  303,  310,  318,  419,  420,  424,  501,  526, 

52  <  . 

Velocity,  397. 

Vergennes  Black  Hawk,  313. 

Vermont,  264. 

Vermont  Black  Hawk.    (See  Black  Hawk.) 

Vernon  Arabian,  70. 

Viatka  Horses  (Russian),  393,  394. 

Victor  Bismarck,  275. 

Virginia,  8,  9,  10,  11. 

Virginia,  Beverley's  History  of,  111. 

Virginia,  Colonial  Horse  History,  108-119. 

Virginia,  First  Importations  to,  109,  110,  116, 

Virginik,  First  Racing  in,  91. 

Virginia,  First  Settlement  of,  108. 

Virginia  and  Rhode  Island  Pacing  Races,  177, 

178. 

Virgo,  311. 

Visigoths  and  Saracens,  46. 
"  Vision,1'  557. 
Vixen,  68. 

Volcan.    (See  Polkan.) 
Voltaire,  493. 

Volunteer,  History  of,  275,  301,  313. 
Von  Mitteudorf  ,  Professor,  393. 


Wadsworth,  General,  328,  453. 

Wagner,  432. 

Walk,  Mechanism  of  the,  154-156. 

Walker  Horse,  437. 

Walker,  J.  H.,310. 

Wallace,  Gen.  Lew.,  66. 

Wallace,  John  H.,  528,  547-559. 

Wallace  Publications,  History  of,  547-559. 

Wallace  Publications,  Transfer  of,  536-545. 

Wallace's  American   Stud  Book,  History  of, 

548,  549. 
Wallace's  American  Trotting  Register,  History 

of,  550-554. 
Wallace's  Monthly,  74,  111,  132,  169,  218,  233, 

256,  275,  294,  295,  356,  415,  423,  428,  453,  483, 

519-525,  227-531. 

Wallace's  Monthly,  History  of,  554-557. 
Wallace's  Year-Book,  History  of,  557-559. 
Walpole,  Sir  Robert,  76. 
Wapsie,  252. 
Ward,  Mr.,  368,  371,  375. 
Warlock,  300. 

Warrior  (Black  Warrior),  149,  150. 
Washington,  322. 

Washington  Statue,  Union  Square,  331. 
Waterloo,  300. 
Waterwitch,  514. 
Watkins,  Julius,  361. 
Watson,  John  F.,  126,  179,  180. 
Watt,  Joseph,  365. 
Waxana,  Pedigree  of,  438-446. 
Waxy  (.grandam  of  Sunol),  438-446. 
Weatherby,  Mr.,   Compiler  of  English    Stud 

Book,  71,  83,  84,  87,  88,  106,  210,  212,  213,  214, 

215,  216,  217. 
Weaver,  John,  324. 
Webster  (by  Medoc),  319. 
Wedgewood,  300. 
Weights,  First  Use  of,  157,  473. 
Weisiger,  Mr.,  436. 
Weismann,  Professor,  471. 
Welch,  Aristides,  309. 

Welch,  John  P.,  438,  439,  440,  442,  444,  445,  446. 
Welch,  Samuel,  361. 
Wesley  Grey,  70. 

West,  Col.  R.,  297,  304,  310,  311,  358,  526,  527. 
Western  Asia,  30,  32. 


INDEX. 


575 


Western  Girl.  502. 

Whelan,  William,  320,  437,  481. 

Whip  (Cannon's),  419. 

Whip  (Ctmiming'sj,  359. 

Whisky  Jane,  336,  337. 

Whitehall,  309.  313. 

Whitney,  Frank,  Artist,  556. 

Whynot,  323,  410. 

Whynot  Messenger,  249. 

Whyte,  Mr.,  English  Author,  159. 

Wickham,  Mr.,  450, 451. 

Widow  Machree,  311,  414. 

Wilcox,  Isaiah.  266. 

Wilcox  Mare,  266,  306. 

Wile-ox,  Mr.,  149. 

Wildair,  451. 

Wildair  Mare,  450. 

Wild  Deer,  149. 

Wild  Horses  of  America,  196-204, 

Wild  Horses  of  Arabia,  26. 

Wild  Wagoner,  336. 

Wiley,  John,  365. 

Wilkes  Boy,  288. 

Wilkie  Collins,  288. 

Wilkes  (Mr.),  George,  99. 

Wilkes'  Spirit  of  the  Times,  99. 

Wilkins,  Richard,  249. 

William  (Imported),  432. 

William  Hunter  Mare,  357. 

Williams,  C.  W.,  501. 

Williams,  G.  T.,  315. 

Williams,  John,  4:34,  435,  436. 

Williams,  John,  Jr.,  348. 

Williams,  Mr.  (Owner  of  Godolphin  Arabian), 

73. 

Williams,  Roger.  13,  133. 
Williams'  Turk,  Sir  J.,  69. 
Williams,  Warren,  315. 
Wilson,  James,  352. 
Wilson,  Sir  R.,  31. 
Wilson,  William  H.,  491,  501,  505. 
Wilson's  Blue  Bull.    (See  Blue  Bull.) 
Wilton,  288. 
Wiuthrop,  364. 

Winthrop  Messenger,  20,  363,  481. 
V  inthrop  Messenger,  History  of,  237-241. 
Wiser,  Hon.  J.  P.,  147. 
Withers,  Gen.  William  T.,  297,  304,  307,  312,  333, 


Woodburn    Farm,  300,  350,  415,  416, 

516^532. 

Wood,  W.  H.,  271. 
Woodford,  319. 

Woodford  Mambrino,  318,  319. 
Woodford  Wilkes,  288. 
Woodmansee,  L.  D.,  355,  357. 
Woodnut,  H.  C..  304. 
Woodpecker,  437. 
Woodruff,  George,  324,  325. 
Woodruff,  Hiram.  326.  346,  481. 
Woodward,  S.  B.,  382,  383. 
Woodward.  William,  443,  444. 
Wooton,  English  Artist,  76,  77. 
Worden,  Mr.,  437. 
Wyllis,  Colonel,  94. 


"  Yah  Amerikanski,"  555. 

Yates,  L.  E.,  364. 

Year-Book.  Transfer  of,  536-545. 

Yemen,  2,  28.  55. 

Yemen  (see  also  Arabia),  40,  42,  43. 

Youatt  on  the  Pace,  170, 171. 

Young  Andrew  Jackson,  327. 

Young  Bashaw,  321,  322,  327,  336. 

Young  Bay  Kentucky  Hunter,  362. 

Young  Bulrock,  375. 

Young  Commander,  243,  357. 

Young  Conqueror,  360. 

Young,  Daniel,  245. 

Young  Eclipse  (Sherman's),  347. 

Young  Engineer,  357. 

Young,  George  A.,  283. 

Young  Jim,  288. 

Young  Morrill,  357. 

Young  One  Eye,  278,  279. 

Young  Patriot,  301. 

Young  Pocahontas  (2:26%),  355,  356. 

Young  Portia,  493. 

Young  Rolfe,  357. 

Young  Selim,  353. 

Young  Sportsman  (Sager  Horse),  149. 


Zachary  Taylor,  341. 


iC 

LO 


6- 


J 


RETURN  TO  the  circulation  desk  of  any 

University  of  California  Library 

or  to  the 

NORTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 
Bldg.  400,  Richmond  Field  Station 
University  of  California 
Richmond,  CA  94804-4698 

ALL  BOOKS  MAY  BE  RECALLED  AFTER  7  DAYS 
2-month  loans  may  be  renewed  by  calling 

(510)642-6753 
1-year  loans  may  be  recharged  by  bringing  books 

to  NRLF 
Renewals    and    recharges    may    be    made    4    days 

prior  to  due  date 


ion  Desk 
date 


DUE  AS  STAMPED  BELOW 


SEP  20 1994 


A,  BERKELEY 
720  «, 


20,000  (4/94) 


